IMG-SMP: Algorithm and Hardware Co-Design for Real-time Energy-efficient Neural Motion Planning

Motion planning is a fundamental and critical task in modern autonomous systems. Conventionally, motion planning is built on uniform sampling that causes long planning procedure. Recently, built upon the powerful learning and representation abilities of deep neural network (DNN), neural motion planners have attracted a lot of attention because of the better biased sampling strategy learned from data. However, the existing NN-based motion planners are facing several limitations, especially the insufficient exploit of critical spatial information and the high computational cost incurred by neural network models. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we propose IMG-SMP, an algorithm and hardware co-design framework for neural sampling-based motion planner. At the algorithm level, IMG-SMP is an end-to-end neural network that can efficiently capture and process the critical spatial correlation to ensure high planning performance. At the hardware level, by properly rescheduling the computing scheme, the dataflow of IMG-SMP architecture can eliminate the unnecessary computations without affecting planning quality. The IMG-SMP hardware accelerator is implemented and synthesized using CMOS 28nm technology. Evaluation results across different planning tasks show that our proposed hardware design achieves order-of-magnitude improvement over CPU and GPU solutions with respect to planning speed, area efficiency and energy efficiency.