Quyu Kong, Xu Zhang, Zhenyu Yang, Nolan Gao, Chen Liu, Panrong Tong, Chenglin Cai, Hanzhang Zhou, Jianan Zhang, Liangyu Chen, Zhidan Liu, Steven Hoi, Yue Wang. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

For years, vehicle trajectory data have increasingly been important for a wide range of applications, from driver behavior investigation/classification, travel time/distance estimation, and routing in vehicular networks, to vehicle energy/emission evaluation. This article presents TrajData, the first systematic solution to reliable vehicle trajectory data collection, with only reliance on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) onboard unit (OBU) devices that utilize lightweight GPS modules and low-cost onboard diagnostics (OBD) readers. In the practical use of trajectory collection, GPS outages inevitably occur in urban environments thereby leading to large trajectory errors as well as missing vehicle location data. To resolve this, we propose a novel data-fusion-enabled deep learning approach with the purpose of achieving reliable vehicle trajectory collection in various urban road conditions. Specifically, we leverage motion information retrieved from OBD readers in TrajData to help reconstruct the trajectory data during GPS outages. By investigating the changes of direction angle from the OBD readings, we can identify different types of road sections. Furthermore, we integrate the neural arithmetic logic units (NALUs) into our trajectory reconstruction model to tame the challenges when GPS outages take place in various road sections. Experimental results from realistic data have demonstrated the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method. In the road test, TrajData achieves an average position error below 15-m around a 60-s GPS outage, even in complex road sections, i.e., continuous turns and driving with accelerations/decelerations resulting in frequent changes of direction and speed.