Here's my interpretation of the result (posted in the hope that it will aid others):<p>The authors are interested in solving motion planning problems with both fixed and dynamic obstacles. They do this using a combination of offline pre-processing and online search.<p>During pre-processing a general-purpose PRM (read: state-space graph) is constructed using only information about the movement capabilities of the robot and the location of fixed obstacles in the robot's environment.<p>At run-time the location of dynamic obstacles is detected and all edges from the PRM which would result in a collision with these dynamic obstacles are pruned away. The remaining problem is easy: just find a shortest path in the remaining graph, from the start location to the goal position.<p>Anyway, it's this online collision checking operation which they implement in and parallelise with custom hardware.<p>Neat.<p>I wonder if in their experiments with software-only planners they also made a distinction between off-line preprocessing and online search? The paper doesn't seem to say. I would hope the comparison is apples-to-apples.
I think we'll look back at movies like "The Terminator" and its slow lurching robots with a wry sense of humour. Instead the future is going to give us robots that can move so fast that they're just visual blurs.<p><i>As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.</i>
I would like to know what about motion planning makes it more suitable for a FPGA than a GPU.<p>Wasn't able find any scholarly papers on this particular project searching the various references. Can any supply some more information?
The Boston Dynamics robots seem to have realtime motion planning that works in unfamiliar environments, which seems to make pre-processing impossible.<p>Would anyone with experience in robotics hazard a guess on how they implement that?