Motion-planning chip speeds robots

If you've seen a robot manipulation demo, you've almost certainly noticed that the robot tends to spend a lot of time looking like it's not doing anything. It's tempting to say that the robot is “thinking” when this happens, and that might even be mostly correct: Odds are that you're waiting for some motion planning algorithm to figure out how to get the robot's arm and gripper to do what it's supposed to do without running into anything. This motion-planning process is one of the most important skills a robot can have, and it's also one of the most time consuming.