S3PM: Entropy-Regularized Path Planning for Autonomous Mobile Robots in Dense 3D Point Clouds of Unstructured...

Autonomous navigation in cluttered and dynamic industrial environments remains a major challenge for mobile robots. Traditional occupancy-grid and geometric planning approaches often struggle in such unstructured settings due to partial observability, sensor noise, and the frequent presence of moving agents (machinery, vehicles, humans). These limitations seriously undermine long-term reliability and safety compliance-both essential for Industry 4.0 applications. This paper introduces S3PM, a lightweight entropy-regularized framework for simultaneous mapping and path planning that operates directly on dense 3D point clouds. Its key innovation is a dynamics-aware entropy field that fuses per-voxel occupancy probabilities with motion cues derived from residual optical flow. Each voxel is assigned a risk-weighted entropy score that accounts for both geometric uncertainty and predicted object dynamics. This representation enables (i) robust differentiation between reliable free space and ambiguous/hazardous regions, (ii) proactive collision avoidance, and (iii) real-time trajectory replanning. The resulting multi-objective cost function effectively balances path length, smoothness, safety margins, and expected information gain, while maintaining high computational efficiency through voxel hashing and incremental distance transforms. Extensive experiments in both real-world and simulated settings, conducted on a Raspberry Pi 5 (with and without the Hailo-8 NPU), show that S3PM achieves 18-27% higher IoU in static/dynamic segmentation, 0.94-0.97 AUC in motion detection, and 30-45% fewer collisions compared to OctoMap + RRT* and standard probabilistic baselines. The full pipeline runs at 12-15 Hz on the bare Pi 5 and 25-30 Hz with NPU acceleration, making S3PM highly suitable for deployment on resource-constrained embedded platforms.