Animals have certain cognitive competence about the environment so they can correct their navigation errors. Inspired by the excellent navigational behavior of animals, this paper proposes a brain-like navigation scheme to improve the accuracy and intelligence of Micro-Electro-Mechanical System based Inertial Navigation Systems (MEMS-INS). The proposed scheme employs vision to acquire external perception information as an absolute reference to correct the position errors of INS, which is established by analyzing the navigation and error correction mechanism of rat brains. In addition, to improve the place matching speed and precision of the system for visual scene recognition, this paper presents a novel place recognition algorithm that combines image scanline intensity (SI) and grid-based motion statistics (GMS) together which is named the SI-GMS algorithm. The proposed SI-GMS algorithm can effectively reduce the influence of uncertain environment factors on the recognition results, such as pedestrians and vehicles. It solves the problem that the matching result will occasionally go wrong when simply using the scanline intensity (SI) algorithm, or the slow matching speed when simply using grid-based motion statistics (GMS) algorithm. Finally, an outdoor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight test is carried out. Based on the reference information from the high-precision GPS device, the results illustrate the effectiveness of the scheme in error correction of INS and the algorithm in place recognition.

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) has been employed in oceanography applications based on a reliable navigation. The complex underwater environment leads to more velocity measurement errors of AUV, so it is difficult to determine the accurate navigation and positioning information. To solve the problem, a novel variational Bayesian-based filter for inaccurate input (VBFII) is proposed to determine the state information under the complex marine condition of inaccurate input. Firstly, the velocities are assumed to follow the Gaussian distribution, which can better describe the model of input information. Secondly, the augmentation method is used to augment the state vector and error covariance matrix to simplify calculation. The augmented state vector, the augmented predicted error covariance and measurement error noise matrices are derived more accurately based on the variational Bayesian (VB) approach. The experiment results show that the proposed VBFII has better estimation accuracy and robustness than other comparison algorithms.

Accurate estimation of vehicle sideslip angle and attitude angles are essential for the safety control and lateral behaviour of driving performance. In this article, the variation of wheels cornering stiffness is considered for sideslip estimation and addressed by introducing a recursive least squares approach. Based on the nonlinear vehicle dynamic model and the investigated coupling effect between lateral and longitudinal velocity, an optimized moving horizon estimator is proposed to obtain the vehicle sideslip angle, in which an iteration decent algorithm is integrated. Furthermore, a framework, consisting of inertial navigation system measurements, a dual neural network and a square-root cubature Kalman filter, is designed, such that the influence of sensor noise and varied maneuvers are alleviated when estimating the system states. Finally, extensive simulation and field experiments are carried out on different driving scenarios to verify the effectiveness of the developed method. The obtained results clearly indicate the satisfactory estimation accuracy of the designed strategy, superior to the existing estimation methods, such as sole neural networks methods and Kalman-based filters.

In order to solve the problems of rapid path planning and effective obstacle avoidance for autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) in 2D underwater environment, this paper proposes a path planning algorithm based on reinforcement learning mechanism and particle swarm optimization (RMPSO). A feedback mechanism of reinforcement learning is embedded into the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm by using the proposed RMPSO to improve the convergence speed and adaptive ability of the PSO. Then, the RMPSO integrates the velocity synthesis method with the Bezier curve to eliminate the influence of ocean currents and save energy for AUV. Finally, the path is developed rapidly and obstacles are avoided effectively by using the RMPSO. Simulation and experiment results show the superiority of the proposed method compared with traditional methods.