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Enabling Faster, More Capable Robots with Real-Time Motion Planning
- Varcht 8y agodeveloped special-purpose hardware to solve motion planning in under a millisecond My poor dumb arduino bots... https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/motionplanning-chip-speeds-robots https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/motionp...
- bfrog 8y agoI like how the picture doesn't show the populated side of the board. Probably a high performance FPGA?
- Varcht 8y agoLot's of talk about FPGA's here https://rtr.ai/technology/ https://rtr.ai/technology/ There is a shot of the business side in the video I linked below, not sure if that is the same board.
- Animats 8y agoThey don't have any big breakthrough, just hardware-assisted collision detection. That's been done before, by PhysX, later acquired by NVidia.[1] The article doesn't say much about how their collision detection compares with what you can do with a CUDA graphics card. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX
- stefie10 8y agoWe are faster than a CUDA graphics card. You get a win from designing custom hardware specifically for this task so that you don't have to load stuff on and off the GPU. The fastest previous approach takes seconds; ours takes milliseconds! Stefanie Senior Director, Realtime Robotics
- contingencies 8y agoI have a robotics startup in the food space. Don't the majority of industrial robotics have a) ample space; and b) well defined motion envelopes? You mentioned suitability for "unstructured, dynamic environments"... so where exactly do you see this technology being used? I can see an argument for applications like high traffic area UAV ad-hoc flight planning (realistically that's mostly military or extreme specialist use cases such as firefighting in a burning building; in civilian use there's an argument for just systematizing the use of airspace in lieu of bothering), but not so much for production lines. I can understand the marketing challenge to explain an algorithmic efficiency advance to the general public, but getting a drink out of a fridge as an example just seems ... ridiculous ... IMHO humanoid isn't the future, humanoid is inefficient!
- Varcht 8y agoI can imagine a bunch of robots building a building and not colliding with each others work. You could do it without rt sensing but that's a lot of messages you could avoid.
- contingencies 8y agoConstruction is all about operations management. You have to get it done ASAP because every day costs money in permits and equipment leasing, if materials or equipment aren't on site then the site goes idle, and storage space is often limited. If you are going to involve robots, you would have them operate to a central plan, not invent their own. This means temporarily fencing off nominally exclusive spaces would be relatively straightforward. Incidentally, I have an acquaintance who is heavily (tens of millions USD) invested in scaling a new business in the custom building domain. The concept is that a site is surveyed, a design set, then they pre-fab the building structure, ship it (internationally) flatpack in shipping containers, and - though it's manual for now - eventually assemble with robotics, an area in which they have been aggressively inventing and acquiring patents. I haven't asked but I very much doubt they are focusing on inter-agent motion planning as a priority. It's complex enough, and that's essentially an avoidable problem.
- deepnotderp 8y agoThis is literally just using an FPGA to accelerate the motion planning algorithm.