Occupancy Grid Map

A representation of an environment as a grid of cells, where each cell is labelled as walkable (free space), non-walkable (obstacle or wall), or unknown. Occupancy grid maps are a standard data structure in robotics and are increasingly used in blind-navigation systems built on smartphones with LiDAR, because they convert noisy point-cloud sensor data into a form suitable for path planning algorithms such as A*. Cell size (e.g., 0.15 m) determines spatial resolution; the map can be rebuilt or updated continuously to handle dynamic obstacles such as other pedestrians or cleaning robots.