What kind of floor am I standing on? Floor surface identification by a small humanoid robot through full-body motions

Abstract

This study addresses a floor identification method for small humanoid robots that work in such daily environments as homes. The fundamental difficulty lays in a method to understand the physical properties of floors. To achieve floor identification with small humanoid robots, we used inertial sensors that can be easily installed on such robots, and dynamically selected a full-body motion that physically senses floors to achieve accurate floor identification. We collected a training data-set over 10 different kinds of common floors in home environments. We achieved 85.7% precision with our proposed method. We also demonstrate that our robot could appropriately change its locomotion behaviours depending on the floor identification results.