Dadu-CD: Fast and Efficient Processing-in-Memory Accelerator for Collision Detection

Collision detection is a fundamental task in motion planning of robotics. Typically, the performance of collision detection is the bottleneck of an entire motion planning, and so does the energy consumption. Several hardware accelerators have been proposed for collision detection, which achieves higher performance and energy efficiency than general-purpose CPUs and GPUs. However, existing accelerators are still facing the limited memory bandwidth bottleneck, due to the large data volume required by the parallel processing cores and the limited DRAM bandwidth. In this work, we propose a novel collision detection accelerator by employing the processing-in-memory technique. We elaborate the in-memory processing architecture to fully utilize the internal bandwidth of DRAM banks. To make the algorithm and hardware suitable for in-memory processing to be highly efficient, a set of innovative software and hardware techniques are also proposed. Compared with a state-of-the-art ASIC-based collision detection accelerator, both performance and energy efficiency of our accelerator are significantly improved.