UNRIO: Uncertainty-Aware Velocity Learning for Radar-Inertial Odometry

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Jui-Te, Huang, Tinashu, Rowe, Anthony, Kaess, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Huang, Jui-Te
Huang, Tinashu
Rowe, Anthony
Kaess, Michael
author_facet Huang, Jui-Te
Huang, Tinashu
Rowe, Anthony
Kaess, Michael
contents We present UNRIO, an uncertainty-aware radar-inertial odometry system that estimates ego-velocity directly from raw mmWave radar IQ signals rather than processed point clouds. Existing radar-inertial odometry methods rely on handcrafted signal processing pipelines that discard latent information in the raw spectrum and require careful parameter tuning. To address this, we propose a transformer-based neural network built on the GRT architecture that processes the full 4-D spectral cube to predict body-frame velocity in two modes: a direct linear velocity estimate and a per-anglebin Doppler velocity map. The network is trained in three stages: geometric pretraining on LiDAR-projected depth, velocity or Doppler fine-tuning, and uncertainty calibration via negative log-likelihood loss, enabling it to produce uncertainty estimates alongside its predictions. These uncertainty estimates are propagated into a sliding-window pose graph that fuses radar velocity factors with IMU preintegration measurements. We train and evaluate UNRIO on the IQ1M dataset across diverse indoor environments with both forward and lateral motion patterns unseen during training. Our method achieves the lowest relative pose error on the majority of sequences, with particularly strong gains over classical DSP baselines on Lateral-motion trajectories where sparse point clouds degrade conventional velocity estimators.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_13584
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UNRIO: Uncertainty-Aware Velocity Learning for Radar-Inertial Odometry
Huang, Jui-Te
Huang, Tinashu
Rowe, Anthony
Kaess, Michael
Robotics
We present UNRIO, an uncertainty-aware radar-inertial odometry system that estimates ego-velocity directly from raw mmWave radar IQ signals rather than processed point clouds. Existing radar-inertial odometry methods rely on handcrafted signal processing pipelines that discard latent information in the raw spectrum and require careful parameter tuning. To address this, we propose a transformer-based neural network built on the GRT architecture that processes the full 4-D spectral cube to predict body-frame velocity in two modes: a direct linear velocity estimate and a per-anglebin Doppler velocity map. The network is trained in three stages: geometric pretraining on LiDAR-projected depth, velocity or Doppler fine-tuning, and uncertainty calibration via negative log-likelihood loss, enabling it to produce uncertainty estimates alongside its predictions. These uncertainty estimates are propagated into a sliding-window pose graph that fuses radar velocity factors with IMU preintegration measurements. We train and evaluate UNRIO on the IQ1M dataset across diverse indoor environments with both forward and lateral motion patterns unseen during training. Our method achieves the lowest relative pose error on the majority of sequences, with particularly strong gains over classical DSP baselines on Lateral-motion trajectories where sparse point clouds degrade conventional velocity estimators.
title UNRIO: Uncertainty-Aware Velocity Learning for Radar-Inertial Odometry
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13584