cs.ROOct 28, 2026

Self-Supervised Doppler-Guided RF Odometry

Authors: Kunzhe Song, Jialuo Du, Jingkai Lin, Huacheng Zeng

Organizations: Michigan State University

Abstract

Radio-frequency (RF) sensing enables robot ego-motion estimation in darkness, smoke, and fog, yet RF odometry remains challenging because multipath and moving reflectors make cross-frame matching highly ambiguous. Existing methods often rely on auxiliary inertial sensors or ground-truth pose supervision. We present RFWalk, a self-supervised, RF-only odometry framework that models dense correspondences across range-azimuth frames as random walks on a space-time graph and learns them from unlabeled sequences through temporal cycle consistency. To rule out correspondences that are cycle-consistent but physically implausible, we introduce a Doppler consistency loss that constrains correspondence-induced motion using radial velocity measured by the RF sensor itself. Ego-motion is then recovered through robust SE(2)\mathrm{SE}(2) registration that suppresses uncertain correspondences and those arising from independently moving objects. Without pose labels or auxiliary sensors, RFWalk remains competitive with supervised baselines in static scenes and reduces absolute trajectory error by 58% in dynamic scenes with moving pedestrians.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Navigation with RF Cues: Embodied Perception Action under Multipath Uncertainty

    Oct 6, 2026Wenlihan Lu, Tianshun Li, Liuqing Yang +1Robotic InspectionRobot Navigation

  2. DAPEVO: Deep Adaptive Patch Frame-Event Visual Odometry

    Sep 25, 2026Luca Gandolfi, Simone Nascivera, Roberto Pellerito +3Visual OdometryRGB-Event Sensor Fusion

  3. Untangling the Geometry and Speed for RF Sensing Spectrograms

    Sep 22, 2026Mert Torun, Darius Cuenca, Yasamin MostofiDisentangled Representation LearningPhysics-Informed ML