Practical Implementation of KalmanNet for Accurate Data Fusion in Integrated Navigation

The extended Kalman filter has been widely used in sensor fusion to achieve integrated navigation and localization. Efficiently integrating multiple sensors requires prior knowledge about their errors for setting the filter. The recently emerged KalmanNet managed to use recurrent neural networks to learn prior knowledge from data and carry out state estimation for problems under non-linear dynamics with partial information. In this letter, the KalmanNet is implemented for integrated navigation using data from GPS/Wheels and the Inertial Measurement Unit. Therein, a practical strategy for the training algorithm of truncated backpropagation through time is presented by taking advantage of the first-order Markov property of the system state of the Kalman filter, which improves the training robustness and performance of the existing KalmanNet. Experimental results on the Michigan NCLT dataset show that our fusion KalmanNet significantly outperforms the conventional EKF-based fusion algorithm with an improvement of 20% similar to 40% in average RMSE.