
Enabling Faster, More Capable Robots with Real-Time Motion Planning - Varcht
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/enabling-faster-more-capable-robots-with-real-time-motion-planning
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Animats
They 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)

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stefie10
We 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

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contingencies
I 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!

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stefie10
Yes, but that is why it costs so much to deploy industrial robots. There are
many applications where it is technically possible to automate today, but not
economical, due to the cost of setting up the robot, due to it needing ample
space and having to program a specific motion. If the robot could see and
avoid obstacles and dynamically plan to pick stuff up, it would not need as
much space, and it would be easier and faster to program them for the task
(when the task changes).

Stefanie

Senior Director, Realtime Robotics

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contingencies
While adaptability as a device for expanding applications and market makes
sense, your example of picking stuff up in a generic fashion also requires
expensive and dexterous actuators, a reliable power source, plus knowledge of
material properties and estimates of things like weight to facilitate an
appropriate grip. Right now, that pushes costs higher than a manual deployment
of dumb robotics (which will be generally faster, more reliable, and easier to
maintain and hire for), which is why IMHO industry prefers dumb robotics. The
reality is that _most environments simply are not that dynamic_ , especially
in industry.

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Qworg
Not only that, industrial robots are chosen for repeatability, not speed. A
flexible system necessarily doesn't take the most efficient path, and if it
does, you'd just buy a dumb arm.

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Varcht
_developed special-purpose hardware to solve motion planning in under a
millisecond_

My poor dumb arduino bots...

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-
software/motionp...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-
software/motionplanning-chip-speeds-robots)

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deepnotderp
This is literally just using an FPGA to accelerate the motion planning
algorithm.

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bfrog
I like how the picture doesn't show the populated side of the board. Probably
a high performance FPGA?

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Varcht
Lot'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.

