Here's my interpretation of the result (posted in the hope that it will aid others):
The authors are interested in solving motion planning problems with both fixed and dynamic obstacles. They do this using a combination of offline pre-processing and online search.
During pre-processing a general-purpose PRM (read: state-space graph) is constructed using only information about the movement capabilities of the robot and the location of fixed obstacles in the robot's environment.
At run-time the location of dynamic obstacles is detected and all edges from the PRM which would result in a collision with these dynamic obstacles are pruned away. The remaining problem is easy: just find a shortest path in the remaining graph, from the start location to the goal position.
Anyway, it's this online collision checking operation which they implement in and parallelise with custom hardware.
Neat.
I wonder if in their experiments with software-only planners they also made a distinction between off-line preprocessing and online search? The paper doesn't seem to say. I would hope the comparison is apples-to-apples.
The authors are interested in solving motion planning problems with both fixed and dynamic obstacles. They do this using a combination of offline pre-processing and online search.
During pre-processing a general-purpose PRM (read: state-space graph) is constructed using only information about the movement capabilities of the robot and the location of fixed obstacles in the robot's environment.
At run-time the location of dynamic obstacles is detected and all edges from the PRM which would result in a collision with these dynamic obstacles are pruned away. The remaining problem is easy: just find a shortest path in the remaining graph, from the start location to the goal position.
Anyway, it's this online collision checking operation which they implement in and parallelise with custom hardware.
Neat.
I wonder if in their experiments with software-only planners they also made a distinction between off-line preprocessing and online search? The paper doesn't seem to say. I would hope the comparison is apples-to-apples.