Road-Terrain Classification for Land Vehicles: Employing an Acceleration-Based Approach

The perception of the environment around a land vehicle plays a crucial role for its driving assistant system. Knowledge of the road terrain is useful for handling its characteristics while driving the vehicles and improving passengers' safety and comfort. In this article, an approach to classifying road-terrain vehicles is presented. An accelerometer is mounted on the suspension of the vehicle to measure the vibration that represents the characteristics of the road terrain, and the road profile can be calculated by knowing the speed and one-quarter-dynamic model of the vehicle. The optimized classifier and features, speed independency, and the effect of employing principal component analysis (PCA) are investigated, and the simulation shows that this acceleration-based approach is feasible for land vehicles in a range of outdoor scenarios.