Spectral Signature Mapping from RGB Imagery for Terrain-Aware Navigation

Successful navigation in outdoor environments requires accurate prediction of the physical interactions between the robot and the terrain. Many prior methods rely on geometric or semantic labels to classify traversable surfaces. However, such labels cannot distinguish visually similar surfaces that differ in material properties. Spectral sensors enable inference of material composition from surface reflectance measured across multiple wavelength bands. Although spectral sensing is gaining traction in robotics, widespread deployment remains constrained by the need for custom hardware integration, high sensor costs, and compute-intensive processing pipelines. In this paper, we present the RGB Image to Spectral Signature Neural Network (RS-Net), a deep neural network designed to bridge the gap between the accessibility of RGB sensing and the rich material information provided by spectral data. RS-Net predicts spectral signatures from RGB patches, which we map to terrain labels and friction coefficients. The resulting terrain classifications are integrated into a sampling-based motion planner for a wheeled robot operating in outdoor environments. Likewise, the friction estimates are incorporated into a contact-force-based MPC for a quadruped robot navigating slippery surfaces. Overall, our framework learns the task-relevant physical properties offline during training and thereafter relies solely on RGB sensing at run time.