Proprioceptive Terrain Classification for Hexapod Robots with Statistical and Spectral Features

Terrain types significantly affect the dynamics and locomotion performance of hexapod robots during walking. Terrain classification is a key solution to modify gait patterns in different terrains and recognize hazardous conditions. Perceiving the terrain with proprioceptive sensing is a robust and reliable approach in extreme conditions. In this paper, an efficient terrain classification approach for a hexapod robot is proposed. The proposed method combines a deep classification framework including the long short-term memory (LSTM) network and an effective statistical feature extraction. Proprioceptive inertial measurement unit (IMU) data is only used as the sensing system for the robot–terrain interaction. In the feature extraction process, four meaningful characteristic features, namely, the mean, median, Lomb–Scargle periodogram power spectral density (LPSD), and Welch’s power spectral density (WPSD), are extracted from the body orientation data using a sliding-window method. These features are combined and fed into the network to perform the training and testing processes. In the experiments, the proposed method is evaluated with commonly used soft computing and deep learning models. The classification performance for the concrete, pebble, and waxed tile terrains reaches 100% with the proposed method. The overall accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and Matthew correlation coefficient are recorded as 95.45%, 96.36%, 95.28%, 98.86%, 95.49%, and 94.61%, respectively. These results demonstrate that the proposed approach delivers reliable classification performance with a low-cost and easy-to-implement solution.