CUDA for Rapid Controller Robustness Evaluation: A Tutorial

We present the GPU Accelerated Trajectory Evaluation (GATE) tool. GATE is a controller evaluation tool written in C++ and CUDA which utilizes Nvidia GPUs to accelerate parallelizable computations for Monte Carlo controller evaluation. GATE offers plug-and-play capabilities that enable both fast development and fast execution of Monte Carlo simulations for controller robustness evaluation. We illustrate the use of GATE for evaluating the robustness of different controllers on Dubins, mass-spring-damper, cart-pole, and quadcopter systems and for performing sensitivity analysis. We also demonstrate the ability of GATE’s core technology to outperform the simulation speeds of five other parallel computation benchmarks.