Registration is now open for CppCon 2023! The conference starts on October 1 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2023!

Cache-friendly Design in Robot Path Planning

Monday, October 2 • 17:20 - 17:55

by Brian Cairl

Summary of the talk:

Point-to-point planning is a major component in virtually all mobile robotic systems. These systems may require agents to generate paths over very large areas on demand; and sometimes several more times during their journey as part of intelligent recovery routines under dynamic environmental conditions. Since planning over large areas is a resource-intensive operation, particularly in higher-dimensional state-spaces, planning routines must be carefully tuned to execute as efficiently as possible so as to prevent perceptible delays in robot responsiveness.

Attendees can expect an overview of common planning algorithms used in robotics, such as Dijkstra's and A-star, to provide a motivating context. Rather than focus on time saving tricks specific to a particular environment or robot morphology, we will instead focus on getting the most out of these algorithms by way of leveraging cache-friendly design of requisite graph and memoization structures; and memory layouts. In particular, we will focus on achieving these results using common C++ STL facilities; and compile-time facilities to promote generic design, where possible. Finally, we will provide comparisons between naive and cache-optimized implementations; and guides for effectively profiling these algorithms for system-specific tuning purposes.