Re-Orienting Smartphone-Collected Car Motion Data Using Least-Squares Estimation and Machine Learning

Smartphone sensors can collect data in many different contexts. They make it feasible to obtain large amounts of data at little or no cost because most people own mobile phones. In this work, we focus on collecting motion data in the car using a smartphone. Motion sensors, such as accelerometers and gyroscopes, can help obtain information about the vehicle’s dynamics. However, the different positioning of the smartphone in the car leads to difficulty interpreting the sensed data due to an unknown orientation, making the collection useless. Thus, we propose an approach to automatically re-orient smartphone data collected in the car to a standardized orientation (i.e., with zero yaw, roll, and pitch angles with respect to the vehicle). We use a combination of a least-square plane approximation and a Machine Learning model to infer the relative orientation angles. Then we populate rotation matrices and perform the data rotation. We trained the model by collecting data using a vehicle physics simulator.