A comparative study of 2D and 3D LiDAR technologies in the industrial applications of autonomous navigation

In the field of robotics, four tasks of autonomous robots such as navigation, localization, object tracking, and motion planning, play a crucial role to ensure the autonomy and intelligence of system in the complex and diverse environment. All of its operation relies on the working ability of laser scanner or LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor which becomes a promising tool for these tasks due to the accurate distance measurement and wide field of view. The objective of this paper is to evaluate and compare the working performance between 2D and 3D LiDAR sensor in the specific tasks. In the different applications, 2D LiDAR sensor scans on a single plane while the 3D one uses lasers to capture precise 3D data of objects and environments. A series of real-world experiments are conducted in a laboratory setting, focusing on three main tasks: object detection and tracking, mapping capabilities, and motion planning. Owing to these practical tests, the results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of both 2D and 3D LiDAR sensors in such tasks. Experimental results show that, compared with 2D LiDAR, the 3D LiDAR reduces measurement error by up to 59% in the Y-axis, improves human detection accuracy by 28.8% under occlusion conditions, and eliminates navigation collisions caused by planar blind spots, albeit at the cost of a lower frame rate.