Mobile GPGPU acceleration of embodied robot simulation

Winfield, Alan; Jones, Simon; Studley, Matthew

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-18084-7_8

Authors

Alan Winfield

Simon Jones Simon10.Jones@uwe.ac.uk
Senior Lecturer in Marketing

Dr Matthew Studley Matthew2.Studley@uwe.ac.uk
Associate Professor in Technology Ethics

Contributors

Christopher J Headleand
Editor

William J Teahan
Editor

Llyr Ap Cenydd
Editor

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. It is desirable for a robot to be able to run on-board simulations of itself in a model of the world to evaluate action consequences and test new controller solutions, but simulation is computationally expensive. Modern mobile System-on-Chip devices have high performance at low power consumption levels and now incorporate powerful graphics processing units, making them good potential candidates to host onboard simulations. We use the parallel language OpenCL on two such devices to accelerate the widely-used Stage robot simulator and demonstrate both higher simulation speed and lower energy use on a multi robot benchmark. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that GPGPU on mobile devices have been used to accelerate robot simulation, and moves towards providing an autonomous robot with an embodied what-if capability.

Citation

Winfield, A., Jones, S., Studley, M., & Winfield, A. F. (2015). Mobile GPGPU acceleration of embodied robot simulation. Communications in Computer and Information Science, 519, 97-109. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18084-7_8

Journal Article Type	Conference Paper
Conference Name	Artificial Life and Intelligent Agents Symposium: ALIA- 2014
Start Date	Nov 1, 2014
End Date	Nov 1, 2014
Publication Date	Jan 1, 2015
Journal	Communications in Computer and Information Science
Print ISSN	1865-0929
Publisher	Springer Verlag (Germany)
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	519
Pages	97-109
Series Title	Communications in Computer and Information Science
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18084-7_8
Keywords	GPU acceleration, robot simulation
Public URL	https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/808271
Publisher URL	http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18084-7_8
Additional Information	Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : Artificial Life and Intelligent Agents Symposium: ALIA- 2014