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Autonomous robots that operate in the field can enhance their security and efficiency by accurate terrain classification, which can be realized by means of robot-terrain interaction-generated vibration signals. In this paper, we explore the vibration-based terrain classification (VTC), in particular for a wheeled robot with shock absorbers. Because the vibration sensors are usually mounted on the main body of the robot, the vibration signals are dampened significantly, which results in the vibration signals collected on different terrains being more difficult to discriminate. Hence, the existing VTC methods applied to a robot with shock absorbers may degrade. The contributions are two-fold: (1) Several experiments are conducted to exhibit the performance of the existing feature-engineering and feature-learning classification methods; and (2) According to the long short-term memory (LSTM) network, we propose a one-dimensional convolutional LSTM (1DCL)-based VTC method to learn both spatial and temporal characteristics of the dampened vibration signals. The experiment results demonstrate that: (1) The feature-engineering methods, which are efficient in VTC of the robot without shock absorbers, are not so accurate in our project; meanwhile, the feature-learning methods are better choices; and (2) The 1DCL-based VTC method outperforms the conventional methods with an accuracy of 80.18%, which exceeds the second method (LSTM) by 8.23%.

The achievement of robot autonomy has environmental perception as a prerequisite. The hazards rendered from uneven, soft and slippery terrains, which are generally named non-geometric hazards, are another potential threat reducing the traversing efficient, and therefore receiving more and more attention from the robotics community. In the paper, the vibration-based terrain classification (VTC) is investigated by taking a very practical issue, i.e., lack of labels, into consideration. According to the intrinsic temporal correlation existing in the sampled terrain sequence, a modified Laplacian SVM is proposed to utilise the unlabelled data to improve the classification performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper studying semi-supervised learning problem in robotic terrain classification. The experiment demonstrates that: (1) supervised learning (SVM) achieves a relatively low classification accuracy if given insufficient labels; (2) feature-space homogeneity based semi-supervised learning (traditional Laplacian SVM) cannot improve supervised learning’s accuracy, and even makes it worse; (3) feature- and temporal-space based semi-supervised learning (modified Laplacian SVM), which is proposed in the paper, could increase the classification accuracy very significantly.

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Recent years have witnessed the development of the applications of machine learning technologies to well logging-based lithology identification. Most of the existing work assumes that the well loggings gathered from different wells share the same probability distribution; however, the variations in sedimentary environment and well-logging technique might cause the data drift problem; i.e., data of different wells have different probability distributions. Therefore, the model trained on old wells does not perform well in predicting the lithologies in newly-coming wells, which motivates us to propose a transfer learning method named the data drift joint adaptation extreme learning machine (DDJA-ELM) to increase the accuracy of the old model applying to new wells. In such a method, three key points, i.e., the project mean maximum mean discrepancy, joint distribution domain adaptation, and manifold regularization, are incorporated into extreme learning machine. As found experimentally in multiple wells in Jiyang Depression, Bohai Bay Basin, DDJA-ELM could significantly increase the accuracy of an old model when identifying the lithologies in new wells.