E²MN: human-inspired end-to-end mapless navigation with oscillation suppression and short-term memory

Abstract

Robotic navigation in unknown environments is challenging due to the lack of high-definition maps. Building maps in real time requires significant computational resources. Nevertheless, sensor data can provide sufficient environmental context for robots' navigation. This paper presents an interpretable and mapless navigation method using only two-dimensional (2D) light detection and ranging (LiDAR), mimicking human strategies to escape from dead ends. Unlike traditional planners, which depend on global paths or vision-based and learning-based methods, requiring heavy data and hardware, our approach is lightweight and robust, and it requires no prior map. It effectively suppresses oscillations and enables autonomous recovery from local minimum traps. Experiments across diverse environments and routes, including ablation studies and comparisons with existing frameworks, show that the proposed method achieves map-like performance without a map-reducing the average path length by 50.51% when compared to the classical mapless Bug2 algorithm and increasing it by only 17.57% when compared to map-based navigation.

Keywords

Vector field histogram / Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) / Oscillation suppression / Temporary goal prediction

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

Zhejiang University Press