Material Classification Using Reflected Signal of Ultrasonic Sensor

Abstract

Material information for environment may be useful to accomplish mobile robot localization. A procedure to classify a set of indoor materials (glass, steel, wood, aluminum and concrete) with the reflected signal of ultrasonic sensor is proposed in this paper. The main idea is to use material-specific reflection characteristics for the recognition of material type. To achieve the classification task, we modeled reflected signal as a maximum amplitude with respect to distance. In this way, we can generate echo signal models for the given materials and these models are used to compare with the current sensor reading. The experimental results show that the proposed method may give material information during map building task of mobile robot.