Robot Ground Media Classification Based on Hilbert–Huang Transform and Attention-Based Spatiotemporal Coupled Network

With the development of technology, mobile robots are increasingly deployed in real-world environments. To enable robots to work safely in a variety of terrain environments, we proposed a ground-type detection method based on the Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT) and attention-based spatiotemporal coupled network. Taking a dataset containing multiple sets of robot signals from a Kaggle competition as an example; we use the proposed method to classify the signals and thus achieve a terrain classification of the robot’s location. Firstly, the signal data were processed using the discrete wavelet transform for noise reduction, and all channels in the dataset were ranked by importance using the permutation importance method. Next, the instantaneous frequencies of the two most important channels were extracted using the HHT and added to the original dataset to expand the feature dimension. Then the features in the expanded dataset were extracted by the convolutional neural network, long short-term memory, and attention module. Afterward, the fully extracted features were passed into the fully connected layer for classification, and an average classification accuracy of 83.14% was obtained. The effectiveness of each part in our method was demonstrated using ablation experiments. Finally, we compared our method with some common methods in the field and found that our method obtained the highest classification accuracy, proving the superiority of the proposed method. © 2023 Jixiang Niu et al.