In this paper, we report a geospatial assessment of the selected mine sites in the Plateau State, Nigeria. The aim of this work is to determine the impact of mining on the terrain as well as the Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) of the host communities. The Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) is used for the terrain mapping. The derived impact of mining on LULC between 1975 and 2014 is determined...

This paper introduces novel methods for terrain classification and characterization with a mobile robot. In the context of this paper, terrain classification aims at associating terrains with one of a few predefined, commonly known categories, such as gravel, sand, or asphalt. Terrain characterization, on the other hand, aims at determining key parameters of the terrain that affect its ability ...

To improve the response of an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) as it seeks to complete an outdoor mission, the control system of the vehicle should vary as it encounters specific terrains such as sand, gravel, mud, or ice. To determine when to switch the control system it is beneficial to have accurate and fast online terrain classification. The earliest terrain classification algorithms were vi...

This paper presents a software system for imagebased terrain classification that mimics a human supervisor’s segmentation and classification of training images into “Go” and “NoGo” regions. The system identifies a set of image chips in the training images that span the range of terrain appearance. It then uses these exemplars to segment novel images and assign fuzzy Go/NoGo classification. Syst...

Visual Terrain Classification For Legged Robots Paul Filitchkin Recent work in terrain classification has relied largely on 3D sensing methods and color based classification. We present an approach that works with a single, compact camera and maintains high classification rates that are robust to changes in illumination. Terrain is classified using a bag of visual words (BOVW) created from spee...

High-speed unmanned ground vehicles have important potential applications, including reconnaissance, material transport, and planetary exploration. During high-speed operation, it is important for a vehicle to sense changing terrain conditions, and modify its control strategies to ensure aggressive, yet safe, operation. In this paper, a framework for terrain characterization and identification ...

Vibration signals acquired during robot traversal provide enough information to yield a reliable prediction of the current terrain type. In a recent approach, we combined a history of terrain class estimates into a final prediction. We therefore adopted a Bayes filter taking the posterior probability of each prediction into account. Posterior probability estimates, however, were derived from su...