A Novel Terrain Classification System with Planar ECT Sensor

Abstract

Terrain classification is crucial for robotic navigation especially in unknown environment. Existing terrain classification methods usually have high requirements for environment conditions and robot motions, making them challenging to apply to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we develop a novel terrain classification system with the planar electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) sensor, which provides a non-contact, real-time, and cost-effective way for terrain classification. Specifically, we design a planar ECT sensor and integrate it at the bottom of a mobile robot. The proposed system leverages the collected capacitance measurements to reflect the inherent differences in dielectric permittivity across various terrain types. And a multilayer perception networks is used to fuse the collected capacitance and IMU measurements for classification. Additionally, a large scale ECT dataset including 10 different types of terrains is collected with the proposed system. Extensive experiments are conducted demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed system.