Ayushi Dube*, Omkar Patil*, Gian Singh, Nakul Gopalan, and Sarma Vrudhula
ย ๐ Accepted at IROS 2024 ๐
Paper link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10802753
This work consists of two main components: designing a hardware-software co-design, MT+, for adapting the Mikami-Tabuchi algorithm for on-board path planning by drones in a 3D environment; and development of a specialized custom hardware accelerator CDU, as a part of MT+, for parallel collision detection. Collision detection is a performance bottleneck in path planning. MT+ reduces the delay in path planning without using any heuristic. A comparative analysis between the state-of-the-art path planning algorithm A* and Mikami-Tabuchi is performed to show that Mikami-Tabuchi is faster than A* in typical real-world environments. Mikami-Tabuchi is also preferred where an added requirement is a rectilinear path with minimum bends/turns. In custom-generated environments, path planning using Mikami-Tabuchi shows a latency improvement ofย 1.7x across varying average sizes of obstacles and 2.7x across varying obstacle density over state-of-the-art path planning algorithm, A*. Further, the experiments show that the co-design achieves speedups over a full software implementation on CPU, averaging between 10% to 60% across different densities and sizes of obstacles. CDU area and power overheads are negligible against a conventional single-core processor.
PLAN_FREQ = 49
HORIZON_LEN = 100
SCALE = 2
PLAN_FREQ = 49
HORIZON_LEN = 100
SCALE = 2
PLAN_FREQ = 49
HORIZON_LEN = 100
SCALE = 2ย
PLAN_FREQ = 49
HORIZON_LEN = 100
SCALE = 2
PLAN_FREQ = 49
HORIZON_LEN = 100
SCALE = 2
PLAN_FREQ = 49
HORIZON_LEN = 100
SCALE = 2