Improving computational efficiency for implementing a sound propagation simulation environment using Python and GPU

This work presents improvements in terms of computational efficiency of a cellular automata based virtual environment for ultra-sound propagation, (previously abbreviated as CANAVI, i.e. Cellular Automata for ultra-sound based robot Navigation). Comparisons with our previous implementations using JAVA indicates good speed-up while using low cost, programming environments based on Python and exploiting GPU's via NUMBAPRO packages from Continuum. Particularly the “just in time” (jit) compiler was found extremely useful. Several methods of speeding-up the evolution of the cellular automata are proposed and compared herein.