A Two-Stage Lightweight Framework for Efficient Land-Air Bimodal Robot Autonomous Navigation

Abstract

Land-air bimodal robots (LABR) are gaining attention for autonomous navigation, combining high mobility from aerial vehicles with long endurance from ground vehicles. However, existing LABR navigation methods are limited by suboptimal trajectories from mapping-based approaches and the excessive computational demands of learning-based methods. To address this, we propose a two-stage lightweight framework that integrates global key points prediction with local trajectory refinement to generate efficient and reachable trajectories. In the first stage, the Global Key points Prediction Network (GKPN) was used to generate a hybrid land-air keypoint path. The GKPN includes a Sobel Perception Network (SPN) for improved obstacle detection and a Lightweight Attention Planning Network (LAPN) to improves predictive ability by capturing contextual information. In the second stage, the global path is segmented based on predicted key points and refined using a mapping-based planner to create smooth, collision-free trajectories. Experiments conducted on our LABR platform show that our framework reduces network parameters by 14% and energy consumption during land-air transitions by 35% compared to existing approaches. The framework achieves real-time navigation without GPU acceleration and enables zero-shot transfer from simulation to reality during deployment.