DANAE⁺⁺: A Smart Approach for Denoising Underwater Attitude Estimation

One of the main issues for the navigation of underwater robots consists in accurate vehicle positioning, which heavily depends on the orientation estimation phase. The systems employed to this end are affected by different noise typologies, mainly related to the sensors and to the irregular noise of the underwater environment. Filtering algorithms can reduce their effect if opportunely configured, but this process usually requires fine techniques and time. This paper presents DANAE++, an improved denoising autoencoder based on DANAE (deep Denoising AutoeNcoder for Attitude Estimation), which is able to recover Kalman Filter (KF) IMU/AHRS orientation estimations from any kind of noise, independently of its nature. This deep learning-based architecture already proved to be robust and reliable, but in its enhanced implementation significant improvements are obtained in terms of both results and performance. In fact, DANAE++ is able to denoise the three angles describing the attitude at the same time, and that is verified also using the estimations provided by an extended KF. Further tests could make this method suitable for real-time applications in navigation tasks.