3L-Planner: Lightweight LiDAR mapping and real-time local planning for ground robot autonomous navigation

Abstract

Mobile robots are widely used in unmanned surveying, warehouse logistics, and emergency response. However, achieving safe, reliable, and efficient autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains challenging, where accurate environment representation and feasible trajectory planning are crucial. This paper presents an autonomous navigation method integrating lightweight LiDAR mapping with real-time local planning for ground robots. At the perception level, an incremental single-frame point cloud update is used to accumulate and project locally traversable space, producing a lightweight obstacle map that preserves geometric accuracy while reducing planning computation. At the planning level, A* is employed to generate reference control points, and uniform B-spline curves are used to optimize the trajectory while enforcing kinematic feasibility and smoothness. At the control level, nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) ensures accurate trajectory tracking by producing control commands that satisfy velocity and acceleration constraints. The framework also supports low-cost evaluation in simulation. Experiments in simulated forests, simulated indoor corridors, and real-world gardens and hallways show average navigation speeds of 2.24 m/s, 0.76 m/s, 0.43 m/s, and 0.38 m/s, respectively. Results demonstrate that the proposed method generates smooth, feasible, and safe trajectories and completes autonomous navigation and mapping tasks across diverse environments.