Enhancing Autonomous Navigation: Real-Time LIDAR Detection of Roads and Sidewalks in ROS 2 †
Publication Name: Engineering Proceedings
Publication Date: 2025-01-01
Volume: 113
Issue: 1
Page Range: Unknown
Description:
Autonomous navigation in urban environments demands robust real-time detection of drivable surfaces despite high-throughput LIDAR data. While majority of current approaches often rely on camera-based or multi-sensor fusion systems, this paper introduces an enhancement of our previous LIDAR-centric solution integrated within the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) framework to address computational efficiency and precision challenges. We propose a parallelized algorithm suite for LIDAR-based road and sidewalk detection, achieving processing rates exceeding 20 Hz. Validation on the KITTI benchmark and own datasets demonstrates improved accuracy in complex urban scenarios compared to traditional ground-filtering techniques. To foster reproducibility, the ROS 2-compliant implementation, datasets, and evaluation scripts are publicly released. This work underscores the potential of LIDAR sensors coupled with modern robotic frameworks to enhance perception pipelines in autonomous systems.
Open Access: Yes