Global Navigation Satellite System

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Period ending 2026-09-14

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Global Navigation Satellite System.

Period ending 2026-09-07

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Global Navigation Satellite System.

49 papers

Latest in Global Navigation Satellite System

Sep 13, 2026cs.RO

Belief-Adaptive Online Autonomy for Quadrotor UAV Navigation under GNSS Degradation in Urban Environments

Reliable online autonomy is critical for quadrotor operation in urban airspaces, where global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) measurements suffer from multipath, blockage, and latency issues, introducing non-stationary, temporally correlated errors that degrade conventional GNSS-IMU fusion. This paper presents a belief-adaptive online autonomy framework that augments an extended Kalman filter (EKF) with explicit GNSS trust modelling, second-order online belief adaptation, and latency-aware out-of-sequence measurement handling. GNSS trust is represented as a latent belief state that modulates measurement weighting and multipath bias uncertainty, and is updated online using EKF consistency signals. Unlike reactive covariance tuning, the proposed approach enables proactive and stable sensor trust adaptation without prior environmental knowledge or offline training. Evaluation in simulated urban air mobility scenarios with correlated multipath, stochastic latency, and obstacle constraints demonstrates improved belief convergence, smoother trajectories, and reduced estimation and tracking errors compared to naive, adaptive, and first-order baselines. The framework preserves classical GNSS-IMU fusion structure and can be integrated directly into existing flight control pipelines, supporting robust online autonomy in GNSS degraded environments.
Deepak Kumar Panda, Weisi Guo
Sep 8, 2026cs.CR

ZK-Trace: Certified Collusion Tracing with Zero-Knowledge Credentials for Federated GNSS Interference Monitoring

Federated global navigation satellite system (GNSS) monitoring distributes a proprietary classifier to partly trusted stations, any of which may leak its copy. ZK-Trace combines public identity marks, recipient-specific Tardos fingerprints, and zero-knowledge credential verification. The registry supports offline tracing without the leaker's cooperation. We establish conditional false-accusation bounds for arbitrary recovered bit patterns, a finite completeness bound under a hidden-bias residual channel, and a deterministic tracing-score bound for correlated feature-distillation errors. An interval-arithmetic checker makes the conditional bound executable and allocates a common budget across accusation and tamper decisions. Under innocent-row independence, the certificate-based evaluation uses a false-naming budget of 0.001 per investigation. It isolates all 160 single-owner copies and traces 712 of 720 two-owner mixtures without naming an innocent. Experiments use a simulated GNSS federation and CIFAR-10. Feature matching preserves the feature mark in 20/20 runs and cross-architecture transfer in 19/20, at copy-accuracy costs of 4.8 and 6.1 percentage points on GNSS and CIFAR-10. Function-only distillation erases the feature mark, and distillation also removes weight-space marks. These results support verifiable tracing under explicit statistical and cryptographic assumptions. Credential knowledge and recipient evidence serve distinct roles.
Redwanul Karim, Nisha L. Raichur, Lucas Heublein +3
Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

High-Order Liquid Evidence Encoding for Gradual GNSS Spoofing Detection in Autonomous Driving

Accurate Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-based localization is essential for safe and reliable autonomous driving. However, spoofing attacks can manipulate vehicle position estimates. Continuous and subtle attacks are particularly difficult to detect because individual GNSS observations may remain plausible while the inconsistency between GNSS-implied displacement and onboard vehicle motion gradually increases. Existing methods often rely on static vehicle-behavior features or a single residual signal and do not explicitly model this evolution. To address this problem, we propose a causal high-order liquid evidence framework for GNSS spoofing detection. The method first constructs a physics-guided GNSS--motion inconsistency residual by comparing GNSS-implied displacement with onboard-motion-derived displacement. It then forms separate evidence streams for the residual level and its first- and second-order discrete variations, with relevant contextual cues selected according to the evidence order. Each stream is processed by a separate adaptive liquid encoder, and the resulting temporal states are hierarchically coupled to predict spoofing at the window endpoint using only current and past observations. Experiments on three subsets of the real-world AV-GPS dataset show that the proposed method achieves the highest F1-scores among the evaluated temporal models on Dataset1 and Dataset3, reaching 0.9535 and 0.9777, respectively. On Dataset~3, it detects both labeled normal-to-attack transitions within four sampling steps. Code and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/pangjunbiao/GNSS_Spoofing.git.
Muhammad Ayub Sabir, Junbiao Pang, Fatima Ashraf
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

Cross-View Sequential Visual Localization with Spatio-Temporal Context Modeling for Autonomous Driving

Continuous and reliable localization is essential for autonomous driving. Cross-view visual localization matches ground images with satellite maps, providing complementary localization cues for pipelines that depend on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals and high-definition (HD) maps. Most existing cross-view visual localization methods process each frame independently, leaving temporal information underused and limiting accuracy under dynamic occlusion, illumination variation, and repetitive textures. This study proposes a temporal-context-enhanced framework for cross-view sequence visual localization. The proposed recurrent cross-frame module aggregates historical context from the previous state to enhance the coarse ground feature of each current frame. These enhanced features facilitate satellite candidate-region classification, while hierarchical fine-grained features enable precise local offset estimation. On the CVIS dataset, the proposed method reduces mean localization error from 3.80 m to 1.57 m and increases R@1 m from 8.14% to 40.22%. Direct transfer to KITTI-CVL achieves a mean error of 2.61 m, with target-domain fine-tuning further reducing the mean error to 2.27 m. Zero-shot field experiments on a real-world vehicle achieve a mean error of 2.84 m and R@5 m of 96.86%. These results demonstrate that temporal context enhancement significantly improves cross-view localization accuracy and supports robust deployment on public benchmarks and real-world roads.
Jiaping Wang, Shaobo Li, Zhen Wang
Aug 9, 2026cs.RO

Protection Levels for Vision-Based Pose Estimation

Vision-based navigation complements Global Navigation Satellite Systems, but certification demands integrity guarantees that account for faulty measurements. Previous work presented a probabilistic computer vision pipeline for runway-based pose estimation with fault detection inspired by Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring. This work extends that framework by deriving protection levels, which provide probabilistic bounds on pose error that remain valid under undetected faults. We present an algorithm for computing protection levels for the nonlinear Perspective-nn-Point problem applied to an aviation setting. The algorithm covers all six degrees of freedom of the aircraft pose (position and orientation) directly. We analyze the effect of measurement redundancy, pixel-level prediction uncertainty, and runway distance on the resulting protection levels. To make the results tangible, we demonstrate tradeoffs in the protection levels on an illustrative runway example.
Olivia Beyer Bruvik, Romeo Valentin, Marc R. Schlichting +2
Aug 7, 2026cs.CR

Rigid-Covert GNSS Spoofing of UAV Swarms: A Structural Blind Spot, Its Detection Limit, and Absolute-Anchor Defenses

Cooperative UAV-swarm defenses commonly cross-check GNSS positions against measured inter-drone geometry. We show that this relative-geometry channel has a structural blind spot: a common, slowly varying translation (a rigid-covert shift, RigidShift) preserves all pairwise distances and is therefore unobservable to any relative-only detector (a gauge-freedom argument). We validate this blindness on distance-verification and semidefinite-feasibility baselines, while explicitly distinguishing it from onboard inertial/GNSS monitors that can raise a bare alarm but cannot recover the swarm's true position. To quantify when an external reference restores observability, we derive the drift-dependent detection floor 2γ/(1ts/T)2γ/(1-t_s/T) for a calibrated anchor-residual detector and empirically identify an additional detector-specific noise floor (measured slope 2.66 vs. predicted 2.67). We then present a centralized anchor-rooted recovery pipeline that reconstructs swarm geometry from inter-drone ranges, aligns it to a trusted-anchor subset with Byzantine-robust fitting, and recovers the absolute positions of non-anchored drones. A segmented estimator jointly estimates anchor drift, attack rate, and onset when no clean-epoch label is available. Across statistical simulations, ArduPilot software-in-the-loop experiments, and Gazebo experiments with rendered vision anchors, the method recovers the positions of non-anchored drones to a median error of 0.39 m (20 seeds) under approximately 10.1 m of GNSS drift, and to 7.1 cm (5 seeds) in the rendered-vision multi-SITL setting. We also characterize the explicit limits imposed by non-collinear anchor geometry, anchor coverage, τ0τ\to0 drift-attack aliasing, and majority anchor compromise. All evaluations are simulation-based and use no RF spoofing hardware or physical swarm.
Minseok Park, Joon Soo Yoo
Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

Development of Vision-Language Model-based GNSS Spoofing Detection for Autonomous Vehicle Navigation

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) depend on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) for localization and navigation, making them vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can covertly redirect vehicles or induce unsafe maneuvers. In this paper, we develop the first Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based framework for GNSS spoofing detection for autonomous vehicles by fusing front-camera visual data with in-vehicle sensor readings (e.g., speed, acceleration, yaw rate) against GNSS-derived maneuvers. Our approach introduces a three-stage fine-tuning process that first grounds visual cues, and then calibrates sensor data within a shared semantic space to detect discrepancies between predicted and GNSS-derived maneuvers across three attack scenarios. We also generated an independent real-world dataset by driving an instrumented vehicle on public roads in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, equipped with time-synchronized GNSS, IMU, and camera logs to validate cross-regional generalization of our fine-tuned model on unseen data from training data. On this dataset, we then generated intelligent spoofing attacks, including trajectory mirroring with road-network snapping for wrong-turn attacks, position freezing for overshoot scenarios, and drift generation for stop attacks. On this validation dataset, the zero-shot VLMs baseline F1-score ranges from 23% to 32%, whereas our fine-tuned model achieves an F1-score ranging from 94% to 95%. Results show that our VLM-based approach correctly classified every wrong-turn and stop attacks, and attains 88%-93% accuracy for overshoot attacks. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive inference policy that reduces VLM invocations to 14% (~86% computational reduction) and yields 65ms-73ms per 4s window. These results point to a practical, on-road layer of defense that complements signal-level integrity checks with the use of VLMs.
Mohammed Aldeen, Muhammad Sami Irfan, Sagar Dasgupta +3
Jul 24, 2026cs.RO

Mag4D-SLAM Dataset: A Repeated-Traversal Multi-Modal 4D Geomagnetic Dataset for Localization and Mapping

Geomagnetic sensing offers an infrastructure-free, absolute orientation reference that is robust to GNSS denial and visual degradation, yet no large-scale outdoor robotics dataset supports its systematic study in SLAM. Existing magnetic datasets are confined to small-scale indoor environments and lack the synchronized multi-modal sensing, repeated-traversal structure, and high-precision 6-DoF ground truth required for geomagnetic SLAM research. We present Mag4D-SLAM, the first large-scale outdoor geomagnetic SLAM dataset. It comprises 14 sequences totaling over 18 km of synchronized LiDAR, camera, IMU, tri-axis magnetometer, and GNSS measurements with SE(3) ground-truth poses, collected along structured campus trajectories under paired day/night conditions in both forward and reverse directions. Through repeated-traversal experiments, we analyze three core properties: magnetic field repeatability across different recording sessions (daytime and nighttime), drift-free global heading estimation, and location-discriminative magnetic signatures for cross-session place recognition. Mag4D-SLAM is designed to support research on yaw drift mitigation, magnetic loop closure, and long-term localization and to open new research questions on how geomagnetic sensing can complement visual and LiDAR modalities or provide a fallback cue under illumination changes, structural repetition, and GNSS-denied long-term operation.
Bibhutibhusan Nayak, Hyoseok Ju, Giseop Kim
Jul 22, 2026cs.CV

RIM: A Retrieval-In-Matching Framework for Cross-Domain Global Visual Localization of UAVs

Global visual localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using remote-sensing reference maps has attracted increasing attention. However, acquisition-time and imaging-platform differences between UAV and reference imagery induce substantial cross-domain appearance and viewpoint shifts, challenging robust six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation. We address these shifts by sampling UAV-viewpoint reference views from Google 3D Tiles across locations, altitudes, and orientations. A two-stage cross-domain fine-tuning recipe adapts SALAD using pose-near positives and geographically distant hard negatives, while local geometric consistency re-ranks the Top-K candidates. We further propose Retrieval-In-Matching (RIM), which freezes the adapted DINOv2-B retriever and distils a local-descriptor decoder that reuses its token field alongside a shallow VGG19 detail stream. One query-side DINOv2-B forward thus serves both SALAD retrieval and local description, eliminating a second foundation-model backbone while preserving retrieval descriptors by construction. We evaluate RIM zero-shot on the reconstructed EPFL Urbanscape and self-collected Chang'an Park datasets, both geographically disjoint from the training data. RIM outperforms ten recent retrieval baseline families. At 25/50 m under the full 3D distance metric, it improves Recall@1 over SALAD by 8.55/13.77 percentage points on EPFL and 4.45/8.94 points on Park. At Top-K=5, the complete measured localization query, including retrieval, candidate matching, and robust geometric verification, takes 67.9 ms end-to-end: 1.8 times faster than the strongest separate sparse-matching baseline and over 40 times faster than RoMa, while achieving comparable re-ranking accuracy. These results establish an efficient and deployable pipeline for UAV global visual localization in GNSS-challenged environments.
Xin Li, Siyuan Duan, Shang Wang +3
Jul 18, 2026cs.RO

An Indoor Navigation System for the Visually Impaired based on UWB Positioning and D* Lite Path Planning Algorithm

This paper proposes an indoor navigation system for the visually impaired, leveraging Ultra-Wideband (UWB) positioning technology and the DLite path planning algorithm. The system utilizes UWB sensors to provide precision localization in GPS-denied environments. The D Lite algorithm is integrated to optimize travel trajectories and ensure rapid route re-planning in the presence of dynamic obstacles. Experimental results demonstrate that the system operates reliably with low latency, providing safety and flexibility for users in complex indoor spaces.
Thanh C. Vo, Dong LT. Tran, Huy HM. Le +4
Jul 14, 2026cs.RO

Attitude Estimation Using Inertial and Barometric Measurements

Accurate and robust attitude estimation is a key challenge for autonomous vehicles, particularly in GNSS-denied conditions and during highly accelerated flight. In such conditions, Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) alone are insufficient for reliable tilt estimation due to the ambiguity between gravitational and inertial accelerations. Although auxiliary velocity sensors such as GNSS, Pitot tubes, Doppler radar, or Visual Inertial Odometry are commonly used, they may be unavailable, intermittent, or costly. This paper introduces a barometer-aided attitude estimation architecture that exploits barometric altitude measurements to provide complementary information on the vehicle's vertical motion, thereby enhancing attitude estimation within nonlinear observers on SO(3). The contributions are twofold. First, we design a deterministic Riccati observer cascaded with a complementary filter, ensuring almost-global asymptotic stability (AGAS) under a uniform observability (UO) condition while preserving the geometric structure of the attitude dynamics. Second, we propose a nonlinear observer evolving on SO(3)xR2, which integrates IMU measurements as inputs and barometer and magnetometer measurements as outputs within a unified framework, guaranteeing local exponential stability (LES) under relaxed uniform observability conditions. The proposed approaches are validated using both simulated and real flight data. The results demonstrate that barometer-aided estimation provides a lightweight, reliable, and effective complementary sensing modality for attitude estimation in minimal-sensing configurations, offering a practical alternative when conventional velocity measurements are unavailable or degraded.
Melone Nyoba Tchonkeu, Soulaimane Berkane, Tarek Hamel
Jul 10, 2026cs.RO

Runtime Safety Filtering for Learned Small UAS Separation Policies under GNSS Degradation

Learning-based separation assurance for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) achieves near-zero collision rates in simulation, but assumes accurate position and velocity information from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). This assumption fails in urban environments, where multipath propagation, signal blockage, and intentional interference degrade navigation integrity. This raises a fundamental architectural question for deploying learned separation policies under GNSS degradation: should runtime safety mechanisms filter the policy's actions or its observations? This work evaluates both approaches for multi-agent sUAS separation under adversarial GNSS degradation. Both architectures first estimate a worst-case traffic state consistent with bounded observation uncertainty, then diverge: action filtering constrains policy outputs via discrete-time control barrier functions evaluated at the worst-case state, while observation filtering presents the worst-case state directly to the policy as corrected input. Experimental results show that action filtering provides negligible safety improvement, while observation filtering reduces near mid-air collisions by 90% and remains robust to the barrier function's tradeoff between separation distance and closing rate. These results suggest that, for policies with learned safety behaviors, preserving the policy's decision authority outperforms overriding its actions with hand-designed constraints.
Alex Zongo, Peng Wei
Jul 10, 2026cs.RO

RASR: Range-Aware Scale Recovery for Metric UAV Navigation

A central challenge in image-goal UAV navigation under Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) denial is estimating metric distance and heading between current and goal views. Dense pairwise geometry models capture relative scene structure, but without a calibrated metric scale, they cannot directly provide reliable distance estimates for navigation. Although global scale calibration corrects the dominant scale bias, the remaining errors vary systematically with distance. In this paper, Range-Aware Scale Recovery (RASR) is proposed, which complements global scale calibration with range-aware residual correction. RASR encodes pairwise geometry extracted by a frozen Matching And Stereo 3D Reconstruction (MASt3R) backbone as a compact descriptor and separates the scale-recovery core from task-specific command calibration. On the official online evaluation of the UAVs in Multimedia 2026 PairUAV challenge, RASR achieved a total error of 0.003189, achieving a lower total error than global scale calibration alone. The results demonstrate that range-aware residual correction improves metric distance estimation beyond global scale calibration. Code and materials are available at https://github.com/lht-research/rasr-pairuav.
Hongtao Liang, Xinyu Shao, Chenxu Wang +5
Jul 6, 2026cs.RO

Uncertainty-Aware Velocity Correction for Proprioceptive Vehicle Localization using Evidential Mamba

Reliable localization in GNSS-denied environments remains a fundamental challenge for intelligent vehicles, as inertial navigation systems accumulate unbounded drift without external correction. Existing approaches provide drift correction through dedicated infrastructure, expensive external sensors, or complex multi-sensor fusion, each introducing practical deployment barriers. We propose Evidential Velocity Correction using Mamba (EVC-Mamba), a learning-based architecture that transforms onboard vehicle sensor data into a virtual velocity sensor for IMU drift correction without additional hardware. A Mamba-based selective state space model captures the temporal dynamics of vehicle motion, while evidential deep learning with a Normal-Inverse-Gamma distribution provides principled uncertainty quantification. The resulting uncertainty-aware velocity estimate is incorporated as a virtual correction measurement into an Error-State Extended Kalman Filter to reduce position drift. Evaluation on real-world vehicle data demonstrates that inertial navigation using the proposed velocity correction achieves localization accuracy within 10% of a dedicated external velocity sensor across different outage durations. The proposed architecture supports real-time onboard deployment at 40 Hz on edge hardware, enabling reliable localization during prolonged GNSS outages.
Abinav Kalyanasundaram, Karthikeyan Chandra Sekaran, Wolfgang Utschick +1
Jul 6, 2026cs.RO

WinTA-GIL: Windowed Trajectory Alignment for GNSS-IMU-LiDAR Heading Refinement in Intermittent Signal Environments

Although multi-source fusion positioning systems have achieved significant progress, accurate and reliable heading estimation remains a critical challenge due to the lack of gravitational constraints and the inherent weak observability of heading in complex environments. Most existing methodologies are specifically tailored for the startup phase, relying on a singular initial alignment to establish the heading reference. Consequently, these approaches lack the adaptability required to refine heading estimates dynamically, which renders the system highly vulnerable to accumulated drift and observation noise during prolonged navigation or immediately following GNSS signal outages. To address these limitations, this paper proposes WinTA-GIL, a novel heading refinement framework that integrates information from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) through a temporal window-based optimization strategy. Unlike conventional alignment methods restricted to the startup phase, WinTA-GIL leverages high-precision local trajectories from LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO) to register against filtered GNSS observations. This approach transforms heading estimation into a repeatable, trajectory-based consistency optimization problem. In particular, an adaptive re-estimation mechanism based on state discrimination is incorporated to trigger heading corrections whenever necessary, thereby effectively suppressing the inertial drift accumulated during challenging conditions. Extensive experiments on both open-source and self-collected datasets demonstrate that WinTA-GIL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both estimation accuracy and system robustness.
Kaixin Feng, Zhichao Wen, Zhaohong Liao +2
Jul 5, 2026cs.LG

Geometry-Aware Infrastructure-Anchored Denoiser for UWB Sensing and Work-Zone Reconstruction

Accurate work-zone geometry perception is critical for intelligent transportation systems, and ultra-wideband sensing offers a low-cost approach for infrastructure-aided reconstruction. However, outdoor UWB ranging is often degraded by non-line-of-sight propagation, burst noise, and long-tail errors, which can distort downstream spatial reconstruction. We present GAIA, a geometry-aware, infrastructure-anchored learning framework that couples temporal range modeling with latent anchor-layout estimation and deterministic distance projection. GAIA preserves range denoising as the supervised task while orienting the learned distances toward boundary-consistent reconstruction. We evaluate GAIA on a real-world outdoor UWB dataset with synchronized UWB, GNSS, and IMU measurements, and further test robustness using a real-data-calibrated stress-test simulator. GAIA achieves the lowest overall range MSE and highest polygon IoU among evaluated filtering-based and learning-based baselines, reducing MSE by 18.4% and improving polygon IoU by 15.5% over PoseMLP. These results show that geometry-aware range denoising provides an effective path toward spatially coherent work-zone reconstruction.
Weizhe Tang, Jiaxi Liu, Junwei you +5
Jul 3, 2026cs.RO

Derivations of Error-State Kalman Filter Kinematics for Globally Applicable Aided Inertial Navigation Systems

Global navigation systems require state estimation algorithms that handle Earth's curvature, Earth's rotation, and gravitational variations. These factors can typically be neglected in local navigation algorithms for robots, drones, etc. In classical error-state Kalman Filtering (ESKF) the error state dynamics are trajectory-dependent. Invariant ESKFs utilize Lie Group symmetries to represent the error, which can render error propagation trajectory-independent for group-affine systems. Choosing between a standard filter (where position and velocity errors are defined additively in the navigation frame), a left-invariant filter (where errors are represented in the body frame) and a right-invariant filter (where errors are represented in the navigation/world frame) depends on system dynamics and sensor configuration. This note presents the mathematical formulas for four classical and invariant ESKFs for globally applicable aided inertial navigation systems. It is intended to serve as a systematic reference for comparison and implementation.
Antonia Hager, Torleiv H. Bryne
Jun 30, 2026cs.CV

PiLoT v2: Pixel-to-Orthogonal Map Alignment for Free-view UAV Geo-localization

Real-time, drift-free UAV geo-localization is essential for autonomous missions in GNSS-denied environments. The pioneering system, PiLoT, achieves high precision via Neural Pixel-to-3D Registration, aligning UAV video streams with a single rendered reference view from 3D meshes. However, its reliance on heavy 3D meshes incurs massive storage overheads, complex map acquisition, and significant computational rendering costs, severely hindering deployment on embedded platforms. To address these bottlenecks, we propose PiLoT v2, a lightweight yet robust evolution that shifts the paradigm to direct pixel-to-orthogonal map registration for free-view UAV geo-localization. By leveraging True Digital Orthophoto Maps (TDOMs) and Digital Surface Models (DSMs) as the reference substrate, PiLoT v2 replaces GPU-intensive 3D rendering with a highly efficient, CPU-friendly map cropping operation. To bridge the severe geometric discrepancy between these 2.5D orthogonal crops and free-view oblique UAV imagery, we train a cross-view feature registration network using a novel, large-scale geometrically annotated dataset. Furthermore, we integrate onboard sensor prior--specifically gravity direction and single-point laser rang--directly into the pose optimization manifold to enhance robustness against cross-view visual degradation. Experimental results demonstrate that PiLoT v2 achieves performance comparable to, or even exceeding, its Pixel-to-3D predecessor, while offering drastically lower storage and computational costs.
Xinyi Liu, Xiaoya Cheng, Rouwan Wu +4
Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

AUSLUN: A Fixed-Hover UAV--USV System for GNSS-Denied Maritime Search and Navigation

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) denial can prevent an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) from both finding a distant vessel and maintaining a globally referenced approach. This paper presents AUSLUN (Automatic UAV Search, Localization, and USV Navigation), a fixed-hover aerial-surface system that uses a coastal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which estimates its own pose through visual-inertial odometry (VIO), as a long-range sensing and navigation anchor. The central design shifts sensing motion from UAV translation to a zoom pod and closes the loop through three coupled elements: polygon-aware annular pod scanning, modality-aware bearing-range localization, and target-relative USV guidance with visual-loss recovery. The same gated recursive estimator uses laser range for the non-cooperative target and datalink range for the cooperative USV. Search-planning simulations show that the adaptive yaw bounds reduce scan time and redundant coverage relative to a matched fixed-sector scan, and GPS-referenced field data show that the gated recursive estimator outperforms non-recursive baselines in localization accuracy. An integrated maritime mission further demonstrates the complete search-to-navigation sequence, including a deliberately triggered visual-loss recovery. These results establish the feasibility and operating boundary of fixed-hover UAV assistance for stationary-target approach in coastal GNSS-denied environments. The source code and a video demonstration are publicly available at https://github.com/xirhxq/pod_search and https://youtu.be/S-5RkJs35JI.
Siyuan Yang, Zikai Jia, Hailiang Kuang +4
Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

Normalizing Flow-Enhanced Message Passing for Multirobot Collaborative Localization

Accurate, robust, and adaptive localization is essential for various robotic operations. This paper proposes a new message passing (MP) algorithm for realizing collaborative localization in a distributed manner. The algorithm unifies Gaussian belief propagation (GBP) and mean-field (MF) approximation, where GBP preserves dependencies among robot states, and MF enables estimation of noise statistics. To effectively handle non-conjugate terms from nonlinear measurement models, the algorithm adopts a parametric formulation in which these terms are treated by gradient estimators. Beyond linearization and sampling, we further design a normalizing flow (NF)-based gradient estimator, enabling learnable sampling. End-to-end training tunes NF parameters according to the behavior of MP, improving the overall estimation performance. To support estimation of practical robotic states that involve rotations, the method is then extended to Lie group state spaces. Finally, the method is applied to multirobot localization task fusing odometry, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) measurements, and inter-robot ultra wideband (UWB) ranging. Simulations and experiments on autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) demonstrate its improved accuracy, robustness, and adaptability.
Han Shen, Guanghui Wen, Liangming Chen +1
Jun 28, 2026cs.RO

Empowering a Single-Frequency GNSS Receiver to Achieve High-Precision Positioning with Relative Observations

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) navigation is widely used to provide absolute, outdoor positioning in field robotics. Advances in Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) technology can achieve centimeter-level accuracy, facilitating autonomous navigation tasks. However, the cost and extra infrastructure used for RTK still hinder the application and more cost-effective solutions are desired. In this letter, we present a novel tightly-coupled state estimation framework that achieves high-precision localization by using low-cost, mass-market single-frequency GNSS receivers with any relative motion sensors (e.g., wheel encoder, camera, LiDAR). We propose a sliding-window factor graph that integrates generic relative motion with global epoch-to-anchor constraints derived from continuous carrier phase tracking. To eliminate the reliance on physical base stations, we introduce a virtual anchor mechanism: upon the initial observation of a satellite, its state is locked as a virtual reference to establish global epoch-to-anchor constraints. By substituting multi-frequency hardware redundancy with single-frequency multi-modal kinematic priors and a robust cycle-slip recovery technique, our approach ensures carrier-phase integrity on cheap receivers. Extensive real-world experiments on heterogeneous low-cost sensor suites validate that our method improves the accuracy of a single-frequency receiver from several meters to decimeter-level precision across diverse environments, providing an accurate, cost-effective and reliable alternative for autonomous navigation.
Xingpeng Wang, Ziwen Qu, Juncheng Chen +8
Jun 22, 2026cs.LG

Efficient Network Inference via Hardware-Aware Architecture Search, Model Pruning & Quantization

Embedded global navigation satellite system (GNSS) interference monitoring requires fast and memory-efficient inference to process large volumes of raw in-phase and quadrature (IQ) samples in real time. At the same time, increasingly expressive deep neural networks (DNNs) are needed for robust interference classification and characterization across diverse signal conditions. This creates a fundamental tension between predictive performance and deployability on resource-constrained hardware. In this paper, we investigate efficient network inference for GNSS interference characterization using iterative structured pruning, post-training static quantization, and hardware-aware zero-shot neural architecture search (NAS). Starting from MCUNet as a compact baseline, we analyze how model compression and automated architecture optimization affect model size, computational complexity, and memory usage while maintaining task performance. Experiments on a GNSS interference dataset, covering both classification and generalized characterization, show the benefits of combining compression and hardware-aware design for embedded deployment. Our results provide practical guidance for developing compact machine learning (ML) models for real-time GNSS interference monitoring on embedded platforms (iMXRT1062 MCU, Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, and Raspberry Pi 5).
Lucas Heublein, Mark Deutel, Axel Plinge +1
Jun 22, 2026cs.CV

Scene-agnostic ALS boresight self-calibration

ALS boresight calibration has relied for two decades on dedicated flight patterns over structured scenes containing planar surfaces of varied aspect and slope. While reliable, this approach imposes constraints on the scene content and operations, which limits its applicability to boresight recovery within routine mapping missions. We present a practical approach that substantially relaxes these requirements by replacing plane-based constraints with scene-agnostic point-to-point correspondences extracted automatically from overlapping ALS strips. Two complementary formulations are proposed to estimate boresight with laser vector observations: (i) a simpler parametric adjustment utilizing INS/GNSS trajectory; (ii) a rigorous formulation treating GNSS and raw inertial data within an existing factor-graph, i.e. a dynamic network, where boresight is added as an additional parameter. Both formulations are evaluated across four operational ALS flights equipped with five inertial systems, covering a wide range of flight altitudes, overlap geometries, terrain types and inertial sensor classes. The analysis draws a clear boundary between the legacy plane-based conditioning that falls short outside the calibration scenario and the proposed formulations, which either recover or absorb boresight effects under conventional mapping geometry. Among them, the lightweight formulation is sufficient for boresight recovery using tactical and navigation grade inertial sensors, while the general factor-graph approach is clearly superior when the inertial sensor errors are less observable within an optimal smoother. This supports the hypothesis that, for INS/GNSS trajectory of sufficient quality, the boresight calibration can be performed without particular scene prerequisites during routine mapping operations using a minimum of 3-4 overlapping strips, with either proposed formulation...
Aurélien Brun, Jan Skaloud
Jun 21, 2026cs.RO

BLENDS: Bayesian Learning-Enhanced Deep Smoothing for GNSS-Denied Environments

Maintaining accurate navigation during GNSS outages remains a significant challenge for autonomous systems relying on low-cost inertial sensors. While classical smoothing methods, such as the two-filter smoother and Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoother, exploit measurements collected before and after an outage, their performance remains limited by the accuracy of conventional GNSS measurements. This paper presents Bayesian learning-enhanced navigation with deep smoothing (BLENDS), a transformer-based framework that augments Bayesian smoothing with learned covariance adaptation and state correction. The proposed method preserves the statistical foundations of Bayesian estimation while leveraging data-driven learning to improve navigation accuracy. Evaluations on the quadrotor dataset with GNSS outages demonstrate that BLENDS consistently outperforms both model-based smoothers, achieving up to 25.6% improvement in the position root mean square error while also reducing estimation uncertainty. Furthermore, BLENDS learns to compensate for the systematic bias between conventional GNSS positioning and RTK ground truth, enabling accuracy beyond that achievable with conventional GNSS measurements alone. The results demonstrate the potential of learning-enhanced Bayesian smoothing for resilient and high-accuracy navigation in GNSS-challenged environments.
Nadav Cohen, Itzik Klein
Jun 20, 2026eess.SP

Anticipating the Optimism Gap: Predicting Distribution-Shift Degradation of RF-Impairment Detectors from In-Distribution Statistics

Detectors for GNSS radio-frequency impairments (jamming, spoofing, multipath) are usually reported with a single AUC measured on the distribution they were tuned on. That number falls once conditions move, and the size of the drop is rarely known in advance because labelled field data is scarce. We ask whether this optimism can be predicted before any out-of-distribution data is seen. On an open, parameter-grounded synthetic testbed with a tunable severity shift, we evaluate thirteen detectors (five physics baselines, full-feature logistic regression and multilayer perceptrons, and single-feature learned controls) across four impairment classes. The optimism gap, the difference between in-distribution and shifted AUC, grows monotonically as the shift deepens (mean Spearman correlation 0.50). It is driven by how many observables a detector uses rather than by whether it is learned, and it varies systematically by class. Centrally, a ridge model built only from in-distribution score statistics predicts the gap for a detector it has never seen (R^2 = 0.47) and for an impairment class it has never seen (R^2 = 0.46); both are significant against a 2000-fold permutation null (p < 0.001) and survive removing the feature that is, by construction, part of the target. The headline findings are synthetic. We then run the pre-registered protocol on three open field corpora: on Jammertest 2024 the cross-detector prediction holds (R^2 = 0.11, p = 0.009), and on SatGrid, whose spoofer power sweep gives a calibrated severity axis, in-distribution AUC overstates higher-severity AUC by up to 0.22 and to the point of sign inversion, with in-distribution AUC and realised gap perfectly rank-correlated (Spearman rho = 1.0). The mechanism survives contact with real data, at smaller magnitude than in simulation. We release the testbed, a software-receiver front end, the ingest adapters and the protocol.
Chakshu Baweja
Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

Ultra-Fusion: A Resilient Tightly-Coupled Multi-Sensor Fusion SLAM Framework under Sensor Degradation and Spatiotemporal Perturbation for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Reliable localization is essential for intelligent transportation systems (ITS), including autonomous vehicles, quadruped last-mile carriers, and infrastructure-inspection unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Although tightly-coupled multi-sensor fusion improves accuracy in favorable conditions, deployed systems remain vulnerable to sensor degradation -- poor illumination, LiDAR degeneracy, wheel slippage, and GNSS outage -- and to spatiotemporal calibration errors. These failures are common in urban canyons, tunnels, and high-speed corridors, where localization drift can degrade route tracking, tunnel passage continuity, and local map alignment. This paper presents Ultra-Fusion, a tightly-coupled multi-sensor localization framework based on a unified sliding-window estimator. Asynchronous measurements are timestamp-ordered and converted into optional factors within one optimization window, supporting WIO, VIO, LIO, and LVIO with optional wheel and GNSS augmentation. Observability-aware initialization selects the bootstrap mode, factor-wise reliability scheduling gates degraded measurements, and online LiDAR--IMU spatiotemporal calibration refines temporal offsets and rotational extrinsics during operation. We extend the M3DGR benchmark with simulation trajectories and evaluate more than 60 open-source SLAM systems on M3DGR, M2DGR-Plus, KAIST, GrandTour, and MARS-LVIG. The results show competitive accuracy across wheeled, legged, and aerial platforms under long-duration and high-speed operation, degradation, and calibration perturbation, improving localization availability for road-level autonomy, campus and warehouse mobility, and low-altitude aerial inspection. To benefit the industrial and academic community, we will release source code and datasets upon paper acceptance.
Yihong Tian, Junjie Zhang, Liuyang Li +3
Jun 18, 2026cs.RO

Route-Constrained Robust Fusion Estimation for MEMS/GNSS Integrated Navigation of Unmanned Ground Vehicles in GNSS Degraded Environments

To address cumulative localization drift of unmanned ground vehicles in structured road environments under severe Global Navigation Satellite System signal occlusion, this paper proposes a robust route-constrained state estimation method. During periods without satellite signals, the proposed method establishes the correspondence between the historical dead reckoning trajectory and local segments of the mission route extracted from a high-definition map, and estimates a route-referenced position via a two-dimensional rigid transformation. The estimated position is then formulated as a pseudo-position observation and incorporated into an Extended Kalman Filter update. In this way, route constraints at the road level can be continuously injected into a unified state estimation framework, thereby suppressing position deviation relative to the mission route while indirectly improving azimuth estimation. To enhance practical applicability, engineering strategies, such as trigger control, matching quality validation, route offset compensation, and single update correction limiting, are further introduced. Experiments in three representative scenarios, including a long tunnel, a multi-segment tunnel, and a curved tunnel, show that the proposed method effectively suppresses error accumulation during satellite outages, reduces the risk of large maximum deviation, and improves localization continuity and road-level usability.
Jingzhi Cui, Chao Zhang, Yuliang Mao +4
Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

WaveDINO: Learning-Based Atmospheric Correction of Unwrapped InSAR Interferograms Validated by GNSS: Results at Laguna del Maule and Campi Flegrei Volcanoes

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) enables effective monitoring of volcanic deformation; however, the observed signals are often corrupted by atmospheric phase delays, seasonal surface changes, and decorrelation effects. Existing atmospheric correction methods, such as numerical weather model-based methods, can reduce these effects but do not consistently remove atmospheric artefacts and may introduce residual biases. To address these limitations, we propose a novel learning-based method for denoising unwrapped InSAR interferograms, using a hybrid training strategy that combines physically motivated synthetic deformation with real atmospheric noise. Specifically, we introduce WaveDINO, a wavelet-based multi-scale denoising framework conditioned on frozen DINOv3 foundation-model features and terrain information. Training uses synthetic magma-source deformation superimposed on short-term interferograms to expose the network to realistic atmospheric statistics while retaining known ground truth. Performance is evaluated on both controlled synthetic data and long-term real interferograms from Laguna del Maule (Chile) and Campi Flegrei (Italy), with independent GNSS measurements used for validation. WaveDINO consistently outperforms competing models, improving agreement with GNSS measurements, and reducing mean GNSS misfit by approximately 3% and 19% at two sites, respectively, while surpassing weather-model-based corrections.
Robert Popescu, Juliet Biggs, Tianyuan Zhu +1
Jun 9, 2026cs.CV

Globally Localizing Lunar Rover in Pixels via Graph Alignment

Precise rover localization is a prerequisite for autonomous lunar exploration, yet the absence of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals and the cumulative drift of local localization methods severely constrain long-range missions. Cross-view localization provides a promising drift-free global solution by matching rover-view and satellite-view imagery. However, the lunar environment poses unique challenges for correspondence alignment, including inter-entity entanglement, inter-viewpoint divergence, and simulation-to-real domain shift. To address these challenges, we propose Warped Alignment of Reprojected Graphs (WARG), a framework that leverages unified graph learning and reprojected graph matching for robust cross-view alignment. Pretrained on the synthetic LuSNAR dataset, WARG achieves an average test error of 0.32 m and demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization to the synthetic lunar south pole region with an error of 3.63 m. More importantly, when validated on real-world data from the YuTu-2 rover, WARG achieves a localization error of 1.68 m within a 100 m x 100 m search area, corresponding to nearly one-pixel precision in low-resolution satellite imagery with a spatial resolution of 1.40 m/pixel. Beyond accuracy, WARG is computationally efficient, containing only 1.56M parameters, corresponding to 16.12% of previous lightweight models, and operating at 5.49 Hz on an NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPU, approaching GNSS-level update frequency. Finally, we observe that WARG naturally develops low-level spatial awareness, including semantic segmentation and structural reasoning, through cross-view localization learning, highlighting its potential as a promising paradigm for spatial intelligence with minimal annotation cost. The source code is available at https://github.com/maochen-casia/warg.
Mao Chen, Xu Yang, Chuankai Liu +5
Jun 8, 2026cs.RO

Dual Quaternion-Based Unscented Kalman Filter with Visual Inertial Odometry for Navigation in GPS-Denied Environments

Reliable navigation in GPS-denied environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics, aerospace, and autonomous vehicle applications. This paper presents a Dual Quaternion-Based Unscented Kalman Filter (DQUKF) equipped with a Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) algorithm for accurate state estimation enabling navigation in GPS denied locations. The proposed framework formulates the DQUKF in an error state manner, where the nominal pose is represented by a unit dual quaternion and the local pose error is represented by a 6-dimensional twistor parameterization used for sigma point generation, covariance propagation, and measurement correction. In parallel, the VIO algorithm tracks features across image frames, synchronizes measurements between the IMU and camera, and provides visual constraints that complement inertial propagation. Simulation results on the EuRoC MAV dataset show that the proposed DQUKF converges under high initialization uncertainty and achieves a position RMSE of 0.2584~m in the difficult flight sequence, outperforming the benchmark filters.
Mohamed Khalifa, Hashim A. Hashim
Jun 5, 2026physics.geo-ph

GNSS-FM: A Self-Supervised Foundation Model for Daily GNSS Displacement Time Series

Displacement time series from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are essential for a wide range of applications, including monitoring tectonic crustal deformations and investigating the different stages of the earthquake cycle. Machine learning methods have proven promising for GNSS applications; however, most remain fully supervised. This creates a bottleneck as labeled data are scarce, even though large amounts of unlabeled GNSS data are freely available. We present GNSS-FM, a self-supervised foundation model for daily GNSS time series. The model uses a dual-stream input combining displacement and velocity-like increments, and is pretrained using a masked latent prediction objective with vector-quantized targets adapted from wav2vec 2.0, with several modifications for geodetic data. Pretrained on data from over 17,000 globally distributed GNSS stations, an analysis of the learned codebook suggests that the representations capture the main signal types in GNSS displacement data, including seismic offsets, tectonic drift, and seasonal patterns. The foundation model is later fine-tuned on two downstream tasks, namely 90-day displacement forecasting and seismic step localization, where it outperforms strong task-specific baselines in both cases. These results show that self-supervised pretraining is a promising approach for GNSS time series analysis.
Nick Teutschmann, Laura Crocetti, Fanny Lehmann +2
Jun 3, 2026cs.RO

MineXplore: An Open-Source Reinforcement Learning Exploration Benchmark for GNSS-Denied Underground Environment

Underground mines present extreme conditions for autonomous robot navigation: GPS is denied, lighting is degraded, and tunnel topology is loop-rich and non-convex. Simulation benchmarks grounded in real production-mine geometry and compatible with GPU-accelerated learning pipelines do not yet exist in the open-source ecosystem. We present MineXplore, an open-source MuJoCo-based navigation benchmark derived from the Leung et al. 2017 Chilean underground copper mine dataset. The environment reconstructs a 104,423 sq.m tunnel network through an six-stage contour-to-MJCF pipeline incorporating octagonal wall cross-sections, LiDAR-sourced jagged wall geometry, three terrain friction zones, a global 5 degree incline, and periodic spot lighting. Geometric fidelity is validated at an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.9538 against the source survey map, and surface texture similarity scores 79.4% across six structural dimensions. A single-agent PPO baseline trained via RLlib across five independent random seeds achieves a best rolling coverage of 88.89% (3 of 5 seeds reaching the 90% coverage target), confirming that MineXplore supports stable and reproducible policy learning under realistic underground sensing and topology.
Abhishek S, Badrikanath Praharaj, Sreeram MV
Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

Wheel-Mounted/GNSS Fusion with AI-Aided Position Updates

Accurate and robust localization remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous ground vehicles. In this work, we propose a hybrid neural inertial navigation framework that integrates a wheel-mounted inertial sensors, enforced periodic trajectories, and a simple, efficient neural network capable of regressing vehicle displacement with GNSS position updates in an error-state extended Kalman filter. The periodic trajectories increase the inertial signal-to-noise ratio, allowing the network to use only inertial readings to estimate displacement. The approach is validated through real-world experiments using multiple wheel-mounted inertial sensors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a significant improvement in positioning accuracy, reducing the position root mean squared error by approximately 46 % compared to standard wheel-mounted inertial sensor fusion with GNSS updates.
Gal Versano, Itzik Klein
May 30, 2026cs.CV

DINO-GFSA: Geo-Localization via Semantic Gated Fusion and Mamba-based Sequential Aggregation

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) is critical for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) self-positioning and target localization in GNSS-denied environments. However, acquiring robust semantics while preserving finegrained spatial details remains challenging. To address this, we propose DINO-GFSA, a framework leveraging a LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) adapted DINOv3 (ViTL) backbone for parameter-efficient, high-capacity representation. Crucially, we introduce a Semantic Gated Residual Fusion module, which utilizes high-level semantics to selectively calibrate and integrate low-level spatial cues, effectively bridging the semantic gap. Furthermore, a Mamba-based Sequential Aggregation Head is designed to capture long-range spatial dependencies with linear complexity. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on University-1652 and DenseUAV benchmarks, notably surpassing the previous best on DenseUAV by 3.48% on Recall@1. These results validate DINO-GFSA as a generalized, robust solution for UAV CVGL.
Beier Hu, Yuanshen Guo, Jialu Cai +4
May 24, 2026cs.RO

Loosely Coupled Factor Graph Optimization for Pseudolite-Augmented Navigation

In Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-degraded environments, pseudolites (PLs) provide additional signal sources to enhance positioning performance, but their integration in optimization-based frameworks remains limited. This paper presents a loosely coupled factor graph optimization (FGO) framework that fuses the GNSS/PL least-squares (LS) solutions with inertial measurement unit (IMU) data. The evaluation considers low GNSS visibility scenarios with four high-elevation GNSS satellites and up to two PL transmitters over an 80~s window. FGO achieves a 22.8% to 41.3% reduction in mean 3D error compared to standard LS methods. Compared to a GNSS-IMU baseline, incorporating PL transmitters further improves positioning accuracy, with performance depending on geometry.
Chih-Chun Chen, Lipeng Tan, Shiyu Bai +1
May 23, 2026cs.RO

Enhanced INS/GNSS State Estimation using GNSS-Based Acceleration Measurements

Accurate and reliable navigation is essential for autonomous ground vehicle operations. Standard INS/GNSS fusion relies on GNSS position updates, which provide limited observability of orientation and inertial sensor error states, particularly during low-dynamic motion. In this work, we propose utilizing past GNSS measurements alongside a motion model to extract meaningful vehicle acceleration information. This acceleration measurement is then integrated into the INS/GNSS filter to improve its robustness and accuracy. The proposed approach is evaluated on two real-world unmanned ground vehicle datasets collected from different mobile platforms and inertial sensor grades. Results demonstrate consistent positioning accuracy improvements relative to the standard position-aided filter, with mean position root mean square error improvements of 11.40 % and 20.74 % on the two datasets, respectively.
Gal Versano, Itzik Klein
May 20, 2026cs.LG

A Machine Learning Framework for Weighted Least Squares GNSS Positioning based on Activation Functions

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are widely used to provide position, velocity, and timing (PVT) information for various applications, including transportation, location-based communication services, and intelligent agriculture. In urban canyons, high-rise buildings and narrow streets can cause signal obstruction, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) reception, and multipath effects that introduce errors in GNSS pseudorange measurements. Although multi-constellations GNSS effectively increase the number of available satellites, the inclusion of degraded signals can lead to severe positioning errors. This study proposes a machine learning framework for the weighted least squares (WLS) algorithm incorporating activation functions to enhance positioning accuracy. Several signal quality indicators are employed as training features for ensemble learning algorithms to identify poor quality signals by providing quality scores. Then, activation functions are employed to transform the machine learning predicted scores to appropriate weights for WLS positioning. To evaluate the performance of our approach, experiments are conducted using real-world datasets from Hong Kong and Tokyo urban areas. Comparative analysis of activation functions reveals that sigmoid functions consistently yield the greatest improvements with different machine learning algorithms and GNSS constellation configurations. The proposed algorithm demonstrates substantial reductions in positioning errors for both single- and multiconstellation scenarios. Furthermore, our results indicate that the proposed algorithm exhibits strong geographical transferability. The proposed algorithm maintains comparable level of performance when trained on data from other regions with similar levels of urbanization.
Pin-Hsun Lee, Harry Leib
May 20, 2026cs.LG

Point Cloud Sequence Encoding for Material-conditioned Graph Network Simulators

Graph Network Simulators (GNSs) have emerged as powerful surrogates for complex physics-based simulation, offering inherent differentiability and orders-of-magnitude speedups over traditional solvers. However, GNSs typically assume access to the underlying material parameters, such as stiffness or viscosity, severely limiting their utility in realistic experimental settings. While recent meta-learning approaches address the parameter dependency by inferring properties from mesh trajectories, reconstructing a mesh from an observed scene is challenging. In this work, we introduce Point Cloud Encoding for Accurate Context Handling (PEACH), a novel framework that applies in-context learning on point clouds to adapt a learned simulator to unseen physical properties during inference. Our approach relies on a novel spatio-temporal point cloud sequence encoder, as well as two forms of auxiliary supervision to help improve simulation fidelity. We demonstrate that PEACH is capable of accurate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on a challenging, dynamic scene. Experiments on simulation scenes show that PEACH even outperforms mesh-based baselines on prediction accuracy, while being much more practical for real-world deployment.
Philipp Dahlinger, Balázs Gyenes, Niklas Freymuth +6
May 19, 2026cs.RO

Enhancing Graph-Based SLAM in GNSS-Denied environments by leveraging leg odometry

Autonomous navigation in GNSS-denied environments remains a core challenge for legged robots, where exteroceptive sensors such as LiDAR are prone to elevation drift in geometrically sparse or repetitive scenes. We present a factor graph architecture that augments the LIO-SAM framework with a parallel kinematic lane driven by proprioceptive leg odometry, coupled to the main LiDAR-inertial lane via an identity relative pose constraint with a selective noise model. Applied to a Linxai D50 quadruped platform across two outdoor loops totaling over one kilometer, our approach reduces elevation drift from over 30m to under 30cm and enables convergence in a scene where the baseline pipeline fails entirely. These results suggest that proprioceptive data, already computed onboard for gait control, constitutes a lightweight and effective vertical anchor for SLAM in GNSS-denied settings.
Léon Perruchot-Triboulet, Luc Jaulin, Kai Xiao
May 18, 2026cs.RO

Assessing Localization Technologies for Pedestrian Collision Avoidance

Robust pedestrian safety is crucial to the next-generation of intelligent transportation systems. Such systems rely on active pedestrian localization and predictive collision alerts. Pedestrian localization can be supported by Ultra-Wideband technology and Bluetooth 6.0, which offer high-precision ranging and low-latency communication, making them promising candidates for vehicular collision warning systems. This paper assesses the localization accuracy of these technologies for pedestrian alerting and benchmarks their performance against Global Navigation Satellite Systems. Experimental evaluations performed in this paper focused on key performance metrics, including localization accuracy and robustness to environmental conditions. Preliminary results suggest that Ultra-Wideband and Bluetooth 6.0 can serve as viable alternatives or complements to Global Navigation Satellite Systems in certain scenarios, improving situational awareness and enabling timely pedestrian alerts.
Joshua Varughese, Joseba Gorospe, Novel Certad +1
May 14, 2026cs.LG

GenAI for Energy-Efficient and Interference-Aware Compressed Sensing of GNSS Signals on a Google Edge TPU

Traditional methods for classifying global navigation satellite system (GNSS) jamming signals typically involve post-processing raw or spectral data streams, requiring complex and costly data transmission to cloud-based interference classification systems. In contrast, our proposed approach efficiently compresses GNSS data streams directly at the hardware receiver while simultaneously classifying jamming and spoofing attacks in real time. Given the growing prevalence of GNSS jamming, there is a critical need for real-time solutions suitable for power-constrained environments. This paper introduces a novel method for compressing and classifying GNSS jamming threats using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), specifically variational autoencoders (VAEs), deployed on Google Edge tensor processing units (TPUs). The study evaluates various autoencoder (AE) architectures to compress and reconstruct GNSS signals, focusing on preserving interference characteristics while minimizing data size near the receiver hardware. The pipeline adapts large-scale AE models for Google Edge TPUs through 8-bit quantization to ensure energy-efficient deployment. Tests on raw in-phase and quadrature-phase (IQ) data, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) data, and handcrafted features show the system achieves significant compression (>42x) and accurate classification of approximately 72 interference types on reconstructed signals (F2-score 0.915), closely matching the original signals (F2-score 0.923). The hardware-centric GenAI approach also substantially reduces jammer signal transmission costs, offering a practical solution for interference mitigation. Ablation studies on conditional and factorized VAEs (i.e., FactorVAE) explore latent feature disentanglement for data generation, enhancing model interpretability and fostering trust in machine learning (ML) solutions for sensitive interference applications.
Thorben Wegner, Lucas Heublein, Tobias Feigl +3
May 13, 2026cs.RO

Galilean State Estimation for Inertial Navigation Systems with Unknown Time Delay

Many Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) use Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) position as the primary measurement to drive filter performance and bound error growth. However, commercial-grade GNSS receivers introduce unknown measurement delays ranging from 50 ms to 300 ms depending on sensor quality and operating mode. Such time delays can significantly degrade INS performance unless they are explicitly compensated for. Existing algorithms commonly estimate this delay offline, run the filter concurrently with GNSS measurements using buffered Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data, and predict the current state by forward-integrating buffered inertial measurements via IMU preintegration. The state-of-the-art online method is an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) that explicitly models the time delay as a state parameter, which defines the preintegration duration. This paper introduces a novel geometric framework for modeling time-delayed INS, in which Galilean symmetry is leveraged to provide a joint representation of space and time for consistent state estimation. An Equivariant Filter (EqF) is derived for the coupled estimation of navigation states and time delay. Validation is performed on two fixed-wing Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV) with GNSS time lags of 90 ms and 120 ms. The test flights last two to three minutes. Simulations further investigate delays up to 500 ms and provide a statistical comparison against the state-of-the-art EKF. Results show that the EqF preserves accuracy and consistency, while the EKF lacks consistency and its performance degrades significantly with increasing measurement delays.
Giulio Delama, Martin Scheiber, Yixiao Ge +3
May 12, 2026eess.SP

Active Sensing with Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Emitter Localization from RF Observations

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) interference poses a serious threat to reliable positioning, especially in indoor and multipath-rich environments where source localization is highly challenging. In this paper, we formulate GNSS interference localization as an active sensing problem and propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework in which an agent sequentially explores the environment to infer the position of an emitter source from radio frequency (RF) observations acquired with a 2x2 patch antenna. The localization task is modeled as a partially observable decision process, since single-snapshot measurements are often ambiguous under multipath propagation and changing channel conditions. To address this, the proposed framework combines high-dimensional RF sensing with deep RL and recurrent policy learning. We investigate both value-based and policy-based approaches, namely Deep Q-Networks (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and study their behavior under domain shift. The approach is evaluated on a simulated dataset generated with the Sionna ray-tracing module, which provides realistic propagation effects and diverse environment configurations. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a localization success rate of 80.1, demonstrating the potential of RL for adaptive GNSS interference localization. Overall, the results highlight simulation-assisted training as a promising direction for robust interference localization in challenging propagation environments.
M. Shamail J. Khan, Nisha L. Raichur, Lucas Heublein +5
May 8, 2026cs.LG

Tracking Large-scale Shared Bikes with Inertial Motion Learning in GNSS Blocked Environments

Although Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) provide a general solution for bike tracking outdoors, there still exist complex riding environments where only inertial navigation systems work, such as urban canyons. Despite decades of research, localization using only low-cost inertial sensors still faces challenges such as cumulative drifts and poor robustness caused by filtering methods. Furthermore, sensors such as visual and LiDAR could provide reliable measurements, but they are not suitable for large-scale deployment. In this paper, we propose an inertial tracking framework that integrates bicycle mechanical constraints with a mixture-of-experts model. Specifically, we leverage multiple expert modules to capture shared representations and weight them through the gating mechanism, thus improving multi-task learning performance and enabling uncertainty-aware trajectory estimation. Furthermore, based on the mechanical transmission between the pedal and the rear wheel of a bike, we explore the intrinsic relationship between the rider's periodic pedalling behaviors and acceleration variations, and convert such patterns into bike's wheel speed for dynamic calibration. Experiments with real-world riding data from shared bikes of the DiDi ride-hailing platform demonstrate that our system improves the accuracy of baselines by at least 12%, with wheel speed errors below 0.5 m/s at 95-percentile.
Feng Liu, Kejia Li, Zhiwei Yang +5
May 7, 2026eess.SP

CredibleDFGO: Differentiable Factor Graph Optimization with Credibility Supervision

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning is widely used for urban navigation, but the covariance reported by the GNSS solver is often unreliable in urban canyons. Existing differentiable factor graph optimization (DFGO) methods learn measurement weighting through the solver, but they still use position-only objectives. As a result, the position estimate may improve while the reported covariance remains too small, too large, or incorrectly oriented. We propose CredibleDFGO (CDFGO), a differentiable GNSS factor graph framework that makes covariance credibility an explicit training target. A Weighting Generation Network (WGN) predicts per-satellite reliability weights, and a differentiable Gauss-Newton solver maps these weights to a position estimate and a Hessian-derived posterior covariance. We use proper scoring rules to supervise the East-North predictive distribution end to end. We study negative log-likelihood (NLL), the energy score (ES), and their combination. Results on three UrbanNav test scenes show consistent gains in covariance credibility. Positioning accuracy also improves on the medium-urban and harsh-urban scenes; on the deep-urban scene, both the mean horizontal error and the 95th-percentile error improve. On the harsh-urban Mong Kok (MK) scene, CDFGO-Combined reduces the mean horizontal error from 13.77 m to 11.68 m, reduces NLL from 40.63 to 6.59, and reduces ES from 12.31 to 9.05 relative to DFGO (MAE). Case studies link the MK improvement to better axis-wise consistency, more credible local covariance ellipses, and satellite-level reweighting.
Liang Qian, Penggao Yan, Penghui Xu +1
May 5, 2026cs.CV

TACO: Trajectory Aligning Cross-view Optimisation

Cross-View Geo-localisation (CVGL) matches ground imagery against satellite tiles to give absolute position fixes, an alternative to GNSS where signals are occluded, jammed, or spoofed. Recent fine-grained CVGL methods regress sub-tile metric pose, but have only been evaluated as one-shot localisers, never as the primary fix in a live pipeline. Inertial sensing provides high-rate relative motion, but accumulates unbounded drift without an absolute anchor. We propose TACO, a tightly-coupled IMU + fine-grained CVGL pipeline that consumes a single GNSS reading at start-up and thereafter operates on onboard sensing alone. A closed-form cross-track error model triggers CVGL before IMU drift exceeds the matcher's capture radius, and a forward-biased five-point multi-crop search keeps inference cost fixed at five forward passes per fix. A yaw-residual gate rejects fixes that disagree with the onboard compass, and an anisotropic body-frame noise model scales each Unscented Kalman Filter update by per-fix confidence. A factor graph with vetted loop closures provides an offline smoothed trajectory. On the KITTI raw dataset, TACO reduces median Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) from 97.0m (IMU-only) to 16.3m, a 5.9 times reduction, at <0.1 ms per-frame fusion cost and a 5-10% camera duty cycle. Code is available: github.com/tavisshore/TACO.
Tavis Shore, Oscar Mendez, Simon Hadfield
Apr 28, 2026eess.SP

Bridging the Indoor-Outdoor Gap: Cross-Technology Ranging for Seamless Robot Navigation

Mobile robots that move between outdoor and indoor environments still struggle with consistent positioning. Satellite-based and terrestrial ranging each work well in their home domains, but combining them at the raw measurement level has received little attention, and the building boundary is precisely where both classes degrade. This paper reports preliminary observations from the HYMN dataset, which time-synchronizes raw measurements from GNSS, Ultra-Wideband (UWB), WiFi Fine Time Measurement (FTM), and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) against millimeter-level ground truth in an industrial setting. Per-zone measurement availability and ranging-residual behavior are characterised. The two technology classes turn out to be complementary, and the indoor-outdoor transition is where their weaknesses overlap. The dataset is publicly available.
Paul Schwarzbach
Apr 20, 2026cs.LG

Forecasting Ionospheric Irregularities on GNSS Lines of Sight Using Dynamic Graphs with Ephemeris Conditioning

Most data-driven ionospheric forecasting models operate on gridded products, which do not preserve the time-varying sampling structure of satellite-based sensing. We instead model the ionosphere as a dynamic graph over ionospheric pierce points (IPPs), with connectivity that evolves as satellite positions change. Because satellite trajectories are predictable, the graph topology over the forecast horizon can be constructed in advance. We exploit this property to condition forecasts on the future graph structure, which we term ephemeris conditioning. This enables prediction on lines of sight that appear only in the forecast horizon. We evaluate our framework on multi-GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) data from a co-located receiver pair in Singapore spanning January 2023 through April 2025. The task is to forecast Rate of TEC Index (ROTI)-defined irregularities at 5-minute cadence up to 2 hours ahead as binary probabilistic classification per node. The resulting model, IonoDGNN, achieves a Brier Skill Score (BSS) of 0.49 and a precision-recall area under the curve (PR-AUC) of 0.75, improving over persistence by 35% in BSS and 52% in PR-AUC, with larger gains at longer lead times. Ablations confirm that graph structure and ephemeris conditioning each contribute meaningfully, with conditioning proving essential for satellites that rise during the forecast horizon (receiver operating characteristic AUC: 0.95 vs.\ 0.52 without). Under simulated coverage dropout, the model retains predictive skill on affected nodes through spatial message passing from observed neighbors. These results suggest that dynamic graph forecasting on evolving lines of sight is a viable alternative to grid-based representations for ionospheric irregularity forecasting. The model and evaluation code will be released upon publication.
Mert Can Turkmen, Eng Leong Tan, Yee Hui Lee
Apr 3, 2026cs.RO

An Asynchronous Two-Speed Kalman Filter for Real-Time UUV Cooperative Navigation Under Acoustic Delays

In Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied underwater environments, individual unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) suffer from unbounded dead-reckoning drift, making collaborative navigation (CN) crucial for accurate state estimation. However, the severe communication delay inherent in underwater acoustic channels poses serious challenges to real-time state estimation. Traditional filters, such as Extended Kalman Filters (EKFs) or Unscented Kalman Filters (UKFs), usually block the main control loop while waiting for delayed data, or effectively discard Out-of-Sequence Measurements (OOSMs), resulting in serious drift. To address this, we propose an Asynchronous Two-Speed Kalman Filter (TSKF) enhanced by a novel projection mechanism, which we term Variational History Distillation (VHD). The proposed architecture decouples the estimation process into two parallel threads: a fast-rate thread that utilizes Gaussian Process (GP) compensated dead reckoning to guarantee high-frequency real-time control, and a slow-rate thread dedicated to processing asynchronously delayed collaborative information. By introducing a Finite-Length Circular State Buffer (FLCSB), the algorithm applies delayed measurements to their corresponding historical states, and utilizes a VHD-based projection to fast-forward the correction to the current time without computationally heavy recalculations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed TSKF maintains a trajectory error comparable to computationally intensive batch-optimization methods under severe delays (up to 30,s). Executing in sub-millisecond time, it significantly outperforms standard EKF/UKF. The results demonstrate an effective control, communication, and computing (3C) co-design that significantly enhances the resilience of autonomous marine automation systems.
Shuyue Li, Miguel López-Benítez, Eng Gee Lim +5