Lightweight 2.5D SLAM with Dynamic Map Refinement and Height-Aware Encoding for Resource-Constrained Indoor Robots
Indoor mobile robots equipped with low-cost and sparse sensors often suffer from limited vertical perception and dynamic residual artifacts in the final map. This paper presents a lightweight 2.5D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework using a single-line laser distance sensor (LDS), time-of-flight (ToF) sensing, wheel odometry, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). In this work, 2.5D refers to a 2D grid map with discretized vertical occupancy bins for each grid cell, rather than a full continuous 3D reconstruction. The system integrates multi-sensor synchronization, motion correction, error-state Kalman filter (ESKF)-based state estimation, normal distributions transform (NDT) registration, and pose graph optimization to reconstruct a pose-consistent global map. Based on this map, an offline dynamic refinement module estimates temporal voxel support across keyframes, extracts low-support candidate regions, and applies geometric clustering and isolated-point filtering to suppress transient residual artifacts while preserving stable structures. A 24-bit RGB occupancy encoding is further proposed to store the discretized vertical occupancy state in a compact three-channel image format. The proposed framework emphasizes system-level deployment value by combining sparse multi-sensor mapping, conservative offline refinement, and compact height-aware map export on a low-cost indoor robot platform. Experiments on public datasets, embedded hardware, and self-collected indoor sequences evaluate odometry reference performance, resource usage, platform-specific 2.5D mapping, dynamic refinement, and height-aware encoding.