An Inertia-Based Surface Identification System

—In many robotics applications, knowing the material properties around a robot is often critical for the robot’s successful performance. For example, in mobility, knowledge about the ground surface may determine the success of a robot’s gait. In manipulation, the physical properties of an object may dictate the results of a grasping strategy. Thus, a reliable surface identification system would be invaluable for these applications. This paper presents an Inertia-Based Surface Identification System (ISIS) based on accelerometer sensor data. Using this system, a robot actively “knocks” on a surface with an accelerometer-equipped device (e.g., hand or leg), collects the accelerometer data in real-time, and then analyzes and extracts three critical physical properties, the hardness, the elasticity, and the stiffness, of the surface. A lookup table and k-nearest neighbors techniques are used to classify the surface material based on a database of previously known materials. This t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Jens Windau, Wei-Min Shen
• Keywords: ICRA 2010, Physical Properties, Reliable Surface Identification, Robotics, Surface Identification