Highly parallel collision detection processor for intelligent robots

A collision detection VLSI processor is proposed in order to achieve ultrahigh-performance processing with an ideal parallel processing scheme. A large number of coordinate transformations and memory accesses to the obstacle memory are fully utilized in the processing algorithm, so that direct collision detection can be executed with a VLSI-oriented regular data flow. The structure of each processing element (PE) is very simple because a PE mainly consists of a COordinate Rotational DIgital Computer (CORDIC) arithmetic unit for the coordinate transformation and memories for the storage of manipulator and obstacle information. When 100 PEs are used for parallel processing, the performance is about 10,000 times faster than that of conventional approaches using a single general-purpose microprocessor.<
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