Road surface real-time detection based on Raspberry Pi and recurrent neural networks

This paper focuses on road surface real-time detection by using tripod dolly equipped with Raspberry Pi 3 B+, MPU 9250, which is convenient to collect road surface data and realize real-time road surface detection. Firstly, six kinds of road surfaces data are collected by utilizing Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and MPU 9250. Secondly, the classifiers can be obtained by adopting several machine learning algorithms, recurrent neural networks (RNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks. Among the machine learning classifiers, gradient boosting decision tree has the highest accuracy rate of 97.92%, which improves by 29.52% compared with KNN with the lowest accuracy rate of 75.60%. The accuracy rate of LSTM neural networks is 95.31%, which improves by 2.79% compared with RNN with the accuracy rate of 92.52%. Finally, the classifiers are embedded into the Raspberry Pi to detect the road surface in real time, and the detection time is about one second. This road surface detection system could be used in wheeled robot-car and guiding the robot-car to move smoothly.