S2MAT: Simultaneous and Self‐Reinforced Mapping and Tracking in Dynamic Urban Scenarios

ABSTRACT Despite the increasing prevalence of robots in daily life, their navigation capabilities are still limited to environments with prior knowledge, such as a global map. To fully unlock the potential of robots, it is crucial to enable them to navigate in large‐scale unknown and changing unstructured scenarios. This requires the robot to construct an accurate static map in real‐time as it explores, while filtering out moving objects to ensure mapping accuracy and, if possible, achieving high‐quality pedestrian tracking and collision avoidance. While existing methods can achieve individual goals of spatial mapping or dynamic object detection and tracking, there has been limited research on effectively integrating these two tasks, which are actually coupled and reciprocal. In this study, we propose a solution called S 2 MAT (simultaneous and self‐reinforced mapping and tracking) that integrates a front‐end dynamic object detection and tracking module with a back‐end static mapping module. S 2 MAT leverages the close and reciprocal interplay between these two modules to efficiently and effectively solve the open problem of simultaneous tracking and mapping in highly dynamic scenarios. The proposed method is primarily designed for use with 3D LiDAR and offers a solution for real‐time navigation in large‐scale, unknown dynamic scenarios with a low computational cost, making it feasible for deployment on onboard computers equipped with only a single CPU. We conducted long‐range experiments in real‐world urban scenarios spanning over 7 km, which included challenging obstacles like pedestrians and other traffic agents. The successful navigation provides a comprehensive test of S 2 MAT's robustness, scalability, efficiency, quality, and its ability to benefit autonomous robots in wild scenarios without pre‐built maps.