IO-VNBD: Inertial and Odometry benchmark dataset for ground vehicle positioning

Low-cost Inertial Navigation Sensors (INS) can be exploited for a reliable solution for tracking autonomous vehicles in the absence of GPS signals. However, position errors grow exponentially over time due to noises in the sensor measurements. The lack of a public and robust benchmark dataset has however hindered the advancement in the research, comparison and adoption of recent machine learning techniques such as deep learning techniques to learn the error in the INS for a more accurate positioning of the vehicle. In order to facilitate the benchmarking, fast development and evaluation of positioning algorithms, we therefore present the first of its kind large-scale and information-rich inertial and odometry focused public dataset called IO-VNBD (Inertial Odometry Vehicle Navigation Benchmark Dataset). The vehicle tracking dataset was recorded using a research vehicle equipped with ego-motion sensors on public roads in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and France. The sensors include a GPS receiver, inertial navigation sensors, wheel-speed sensors amongst other sensors found in the car, as well as the inertial navigation sensors and GPS receiver in an Android smart phone sampling at 10 Hz. A diverse number of driving scenarios were captured such as traffic congestion, round-abouts, hard-braking, etc. on different road types (e.g. country roads, motorways, etc.) and with varying driving patterns. The dataset consists of a total driving time of about 40 h over 1,300 km for the vehicle extracted data and about 58 h over 4,400 km for the smartphone recorded data. We hope that this dataset will prove valuable in furthering research on the correlation between vehicle dynamics and dependable positioning estimation based on vehicle ego-motion sensors, as well as other related studies.