Comparison of Different Approaches to Vibration-based Terrain Classification

Abstract

Abstract — There is a variety of different terrain types in outdoor environments, each posing different dangers to the robot and demanding a different driving style. In a previous paper, we presented a terrain classification method based on Support Vector Machines (SVM), which uses vibrations induced in the body of the robot to learn different terrain classes. However, in the previous paper, our experimental results were based on vibration data collected by a hand-pulled cart with relatively hard wheels. In this paper, we present experiments on data collected by our RWI ATRV-Jr outdoor robot. Additionally, we compare our SVM-based method to alternative classification methods. The comparison shows that our approach outperforms the other methods. Index Terms — Outdoor robotics, vibration-based terrain classification I.