The microarchitecture of a real-time robot motion planning accelerator

Abstract

We have developed a hardware accelerator for motion planning, a critical operation in robotics. In this paper, we present the microarchitecture of our accelerator and describe a prototype implementation on an FPGA. We experimentally show that the accelerator improves performance by three orders of magnitude and improves power consumption by more than one order of magnitude. These gains are achieved through careful hardware/software co-design. We modify conventional motion planning algorithms to aggressively precompute collision data, as well as implement a microarchitecture that leverages the parallelism present in the problem.