FTS Assessment

These scripts were used to prepare the paper "Field Assessment of Force Torque Sensors for Planetary Rover Navigation". The source code is licensed under the MIT License.

Links

• Paper (Oct. 2025): https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-025-02324-2
• Data: https://doi.org/10.57780/esa-xxd1ysw
• Dataset paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03881-1

Reproducibility

Results in the paper were generated using code release v0.2-revision. The preprint was prepared with code release v0.1-preprint.

Dependencies

This repository uses Python 3.10. All requirements are listed in pyproject.toml.

Install them via uv

uv sync
uv pip install -e .

or pip

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

Data path

Point the scripts to the Baseprod traverse data. You can use your own path like so:

1. Set the environment variable for your path, e.g.

   export BASEPROD_TRAVERSE_PATH="/mnt/baseprod/sensor_data"

2. Alternatively, modify the default path (if no correct environment variable is found) in preprocessing/traverse_overview.

Preprocessing

• Check how much data is usable according to the distance computed by Fy/Tx with preprocessing/find_usable.py.

  python -m preprocessing.find_usable

• Generate the dataset for the later machine learning with preprocessing/export_classification_stats.py.

  python -m preprocessing.export_classification_stats

  Creates three output files (training_data.csv, training_data_ft.csv, training_data_imu.csv) containing the data for all sensors, only the force torque sensors, and only the IMU data, respectively.

  If only a subset of FTSs should be included, --fts_names FL FR can be passed to only include the data from FTSs FL and FR (plus IMU) for example.

• Plot FTS and IMU data with preprocessing/plot_fts_imu.py

  python -m preprocessing.plot_fts_imu

Run classification training

From the project's root, invoke

python -m ml.svm --csv training_data_ft.csv --data_source fts

or

python -m ml.train --csv training_data.csv --data_source all

See all possible arguments by passing --help.

Citation

If you find this work helpful, please cite it as:

Gerdes, L., Pérez del Pulgar, C., Castilla Arquillo, R., Azkarate, M. Field Assessment of Force Torque Sensors for Planetary Rover Navigation. J Intell Robot Syst 111, 122 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-025-02324-2

@article{Gerdes2025FTS,
  author={Gerdes, Levin and P{\'e}rez del Pulgar, Carlos and Castilla Arquillo, Ra{\'u}l and Azkarate, Martin},
  title={Field Assessment of Force Torque Sensors for Planetary Rover Navigation},
  journal={Journal of Intelligent {\&} Robotic Systems},
  year={2025},
  month={Oct},
  day={30},
  volume={111},
  number={4},
  pages={122},
  doi={10.1007/s10846-025-02324-2},
  url={https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-025-02324-2}
}