Navigating through various environmental challenges presents a risk for autonomous platforms like cars, drones, aircrafts and boats. This danger ranges from obstructing visibility (either human or sensors) to causing damage to the vehicles. Detection of these environments and obstacles ahead is vital for the safety of future autonomous platforms, necessitating a proactive strategy to avoid entering these hazardous conditions. Effectively addressing this challenge requires cutting-edge short-range sensing technology. The focus of this PhD research project is the development of holistic theoretical modelling and verification of the modelling with real experimental data from commercially available THz sensors. To enhance the accuracy and overall effectiveness of the system, signal processing and machine learning techniques will be employed to design automatic detection and classification capabilities for complex environments.