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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23342 |
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| _version_ | 1866911541756952576 |
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| author | Hohmann, Jannik Wang, Dong Nüchter, Andreas |
| author_facet | Hohmann, Jannik Wang, Dong Nüchter, Andreas |
| contents | Material awareness can improve robotic navigation and interaction, particularly in conditions where cameras and LiDAR degrade. We present a lightweight mmWave radar material classification pipeline designed for ultra-low-power edge devices (TI IWRL6432), using compact range-bin intensity descriptors and a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) for real-time inference. While the classifier reaches a macro-F1 of 94.2\% under the nominal training geometry, we observe a pronounced performance drop under realistic geometry shifts, including sensor height changes and small tilt angles. These perturbations induce systematic intensity scaling and angle-dependent radar cross section (RCS) effects, pushing features out of distribution and reducing macro-F1 to around 68.5\%. We analyze these failure modes and outline practical directions for improving robustness with normalization, geometry augmentation, and motion-aware features. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_23342 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Edge Radar Material Classification Under Geometry Shifts Hohmann, Jannik Wang, Dong Nüchter, Andreas Robotics Artificial Intelligence Material awareness can improve robotic navigation and interaction, particularly in conditions where cameras and LiDAR degrade. We present a lightweight mmWave radar material classification pipeline designed for ultra-low-power edge devices (TI IWRL6432), using compact range-bin intensity descriptors and a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) for real-time inference. While the classifier reaches a macro-F1 of 94.2\% under the nominal training geometry, we observe a pronounced performance drop under realistic geometry shifts, including sensor height changes and small tilt angles. These perturbations induce systematic intensity scaling and angle-dependent radar cross section (RCS) effects, pushing features out of distribution and reducing macro-F1 to around 68.5\%. We analyze these failure modes and outline practical directions for improving robustness with normalization, geometry augmentation, and motion-aware features. |
| title | Edge Radar Material Classification Under Geometry Shifts |
| topic | Robotics Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23342 |