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Mobile GPGPU Acceleration of Embodied Robot Simulation

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Artificial Life and Intelligent Agents (ALIA 2014)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 519))

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Abstract

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 on-board 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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Nvidia 6800 Ultra 40 GFLOPS, 100 W, Pentium 4 7 GFLOPS [11]. Chromebook with Samsung Exynos 5250 72 GFLOPS GPU, 27 GFLOPS CPU, \(<\)7 W.

  2. 2.

    The modified source code is available at https://bitbucket.org/siteks/stage_opencl.

  3. 3.

    The data structures are composed of C++ classes, while OpenCL is based on C99.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

    Simon Jones, Matthew Studley & Alan Winfield

  2. University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Simon Jones

Authors
  1. Simon Jones
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  2. Matthew Studley
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  3. Alan Winfield
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simon Jones .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bangor University, Bangor, United Kingdom

    Christopher J. Headleand

  2. Bangor University, Bangor, United Kingdom

    William J. Teahan

  3. Bangor University, Bangor, United Kingdom

    Llyr Ap Cenydd

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Jones, S., Studley, M., Winfield, A. (2015). Mobile GPGPU Acceleration of Embodied Robot Simulation. In: Headleand, C., Teahan, W., Ap Cenydd, L. (eds) Artificial Life and Intelligent Agents. ALIA 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 519. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18084-7_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18084-7_8

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