Environment-Aware Learning of Smooth GNSS Covariance Dynamics for Autonomous Racing

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21366v2
• Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2026 07:02:04 GMT
• Title: Environment-Aware Learning of Smooth GNSS Covariance Dynamics for Autonomous Racing
• Abstract summary: We develop a learning-based framework, LACE, capable of directly modeling the temporal dynamics of measurement covariance.<n>We validate our approach on an AV-24 autonomous racecar, demonstrating improved localization performance and smoother covariance estimates.
• Score: 6.1051905803719295
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Ensuring accurate and stable state estimation is a challenging task crucial to safety-critical domains such as high-speed autonomous racing, where measurement uncertainty must be both adaptive to the environment and temporally smooth for control. In this work, we develop a learning-based framework, LACE, capable of directly modeling the temporal dynamics of GNSS measurement covariance. We model the covariance evolution as an exponentially stable dynamical system where a deep neural network (DNN) learns to predict the system's process noise from environmental features through an attention mechanism. By using contraction-based stability and systematically imposing spectral constraints, we formally provide guarantees of exponential stability and smoothness for the resulting covariance dynamics. We validate our approach on an AV-24 autonomous racecar, demonstrating improved localization performance and smoother covariance estimates in challenging, GNSS-degraded environments. Our results highlight the promise of dynamically modeling the perceived uncertainty in state estimation problems that are tightly coupled with control sensitivity.

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