Dadu-P: a scalable accelerator for robot motion planning in a dynamic environment

As a critical operation in robotics, motion planning consumes lots of time and energy, especially in a dynamic environment. Through approaches based on general-purpose processors, it is hard to get a valid planning in real time. We present an accelerator to speed up collision detection, which costs over 90% of the computation time in motion planning. Via the octree-based roadmap representation, the accelerator can be reconfigured online and support large roadmaps. We in addition propose an effective algorithm to update the roadmap in a dynamic environment, together with a batched incremental processing approach to reduce the complexity of collision detection. Experimental results show that our accelerator achieves 26.5X speedup than an existing CPU-based approach. With the incremental approach, the performance further improves by 10X while the solution quality is degraded by 10% only.