DaDu Series - Fast and Efficient Robot Accelerators

Research on accelerators for robotics is increasing. This article introduces the kinematics, motion planning and collision detection algorithms and our accelerators in robotics, and then analyzes their advantages, disadvantages and bottlenecks. In view of the shortcomings of the existing accelerators, this paper will show a series accelerators named “DaDu” that we have proposed. For kinematics, we have proposed Dadu [1] to accelerate the inverse kinematics algorithm, which achieves 1700x speedup than the CPU implementation, 30x speedup than the GPU implementation, and 776x higher energy efficiency than the GPU implementation. For motion planning, we have proposed Dadu-P [2] to accelerate the PRM algorithm. It can get 26.5x speedup than an existing CPU-based approach for collision detection. Furthermore, with an incremental approach, the performance of motion planning can further be improved by 10x while the solution quality is degraded by 10% only. For the collision detection algorithm in motion planning, the proposed accelerator Dadu-CD [3] elaborates the in-memory processing architecture, achieving at least 5x speedup than Dadu-P in the total planning time and 9.55x lower energy consumption than Dadu-P.