Lost in Time? Continuous Symmetry and Identifiability in Aided Inertial Navigation with Unknown Measurement Delays

Jonathan Kelly, Phone Thiha Kyaw, Mattew Giamou

In many multisensor systems, measurements from different sensors are subject to unknown relative time delays. Accurate state estimation requires that delays be accounted for and, when possible, calibrated online. We consider the case of aided navigation, where measurements from a single aiding sensor are subject to an unknown but constant delay relative to the inertial measurement stream, and study the identifiability of the resulting system. Critically, identifiability depends not only on the temporal structure of the measurements, but also on the shape of the vehicle trajectory: some trajectories are sufficiently informative to support unique recovery of the delay and the navigation state, while others are not. Using the special Galilean group, we characterize these uninformative (or degenerate) trajectories and relate them to a continuous symmetry of the delayed measurement model, providing geometric insight into identifiability failures. We show that the class of trajectories for which identifiability fails is larger than previously reported, and connect our characterization to the familiar linearized, Jacobian-based analysis. Although our development is motivated by aided navigation, the underlying ideas apply more broadly to estimation problems on Lie groups with delayed measurements.