{"ID":2843798,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06801","arxiv_id":"2511.06801","title":"Vision-Aided Online A* Path Planning for Efficient and Safe Navigation of Service Robots","abstract":"The deployment of autonomous service robots in human-centric environments is hindered by a critical gap in perception and planning. Traditional navigation systems rely on expensive LiDARs that, while geometrically precise, are semantically unaware, they cannot distinguish a important document on an office floor from a harmless piece of litter, treating both as physically traversable. While advanced semantic segmentation exists, no prior work has successfully integrated this visual intelligence into a real-time path planner that is efficient enough for low-cost, embedded hardware. This paper presents a framework to bridge this gap, delivering context-aware navigation on an affordable robotic platform. Our approach centers on a novel, tight integration of a lightweight perception module with an online A* planner. The perception system employs a semantic segmentation model to identify user-defined visual constraints, enabling the robot to navigate based on contextual importance rather than physical size alone. This adaptability allows an operator to define what is critical for a given task, be it sensitive papers in an office or safety lines in a factory, thus resolving the ambiguity of what to avoid. This semantic perception is seamlessly fused with geometric data. The identified visual constraints are projected as non-geometric obstacles onto a global map that is continuously updated from sensor data, enabling robust navigation through both partially known and unknown environments. We validate our framework through extensive experiments in high-fidelity simulations and on a real-world robotic platform. The results demonstrate robust, real-time performance, proving that a cost-effective robot can safely navigate complex environments while respecting critical visual cues invisible to traditional planners.","short_abstract":"The deployment of autonomous service robots in human-centric environments is hindered by a critical gap in perception and planning. Traditional navigation systems rely on expensive LiDARs that, while geometrically precise, are semantically unaware, they cannot distinguish a important document on an office floor from a...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06801","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06801v1","authors":"[\"Praveen Kumar\",\"Tushar Sandhan\"]","published":"2025-11-10T07:44:22Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}