Pillar-Bin: A 3D Object Detection Algorithm for Communication-Denied UGVs

Addressing the challenge of acquiring high-precision leader Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) pose information in real time for communication-denied leader–follower formations, this study proposed Pillar-Bin, a 3D object detection algorithm based on the PointPillars framework. Pillar-Bin introduced an Interval Discretization Strategy (Bin) within the detection head, mapping critical target parameters (dimensions, center, heading angle) to predefined intervals for joint classification-residual regression optimization. This effectively suppresses environmental noise and enhances localization accuracy. Simulation results on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that the Pillar-Bin algorithm significantly outperforms PointPillars in detection accuracy. In the 3D detection mode, the mean Average Precision (mAP) increased by 2.95%, while in the bird’s eye view (BEV) detection mode, mAP was improved by 0.94%. With a processing rate of 48 frames per second (FPS), the proposed algorithm effectively enhanced detection accuracy while maintaining the high real-time performance of the baseline method. To evaluate Pillar-Bin’s real-vehicle performance, a leader UGV pose extraction scheme was designed. Real-vehicle experiments show absolute X/Y positioning errors below 5 cm and heading angle errors under 5° in Cartesian coordinates, with the pose extraction processing speed reaching 46 FPS. The proposed Pillar-Bin algorithm and its pose extraction scheme provide efficient and accurate leader pose information for formation control, demonstrating practical engineering utility.