A Road Identification Method Based on Electrostatic Induction Signal

A novel method for material identification based on electrostatic signal detection technology is presented. 4 kinds of typical roads, i.e. brick, sand, grass and asphalt, which can be often encountered in outdoor environment, are effectively identified using the proposed method. The induced charge change on robot foot is analyzed by establishing an equivalent model for the contact/separation process between the robot foot and the road surface. The simulation result shows that there are obvious differences in the discharge of surface charge of different pavement materials. Based on that, a special structure of measurement platform is proposed for simulation of contact and separation between robot foot and roads. 4 kinds of road surface electrostatic signals are collected, and the feature value of the signal is extracted as the classifier parameter. The k-nearest neighbor classifier is used to classify the road surface electrostatic signals. The result shows that the overall recognition rate is about 83.3%.