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arXiv · 2609.13420

Arborist: Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design for Fast and Efficient Motion Planning

Yaotian Liu·Lingyi Huang·Zishen Wan·Bo Yuan·Cheng Tan·Jeff·Zhang
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Abstract

Real-time motion planning must execute under strict latency and energy constraints on resource-limited platforms. This paper presents Arborist, an algorithm-hardware co-design framework that accelerates Fast Marching Tree (FMT*) motion planning through synergistic algorithmic and architectural innovations. At the algorithm level, Arborist introduces safe multi-tree expansion with global competition management and cross-tree optimality checking to expose inter-tree parallelism while preserving path quality. At the architecture level, our proposed ArboristAccel integrates an Arborist Toolbox that provides hardware support for inter-tree parallelism; a KD-tree Subsystem for high-throughput near-neighbor search; a Parallel-Query Retrieval module that balances multi-bank memory accesses to alleviate system-level memory bandwidth bottlenecks; and a Look-ahead Planning Engine that exploits intra-tree parallelism while preserving path quality by in-order commit. Synthesized in 16 nm and operating at 500 MHz, ArboristAccel sustains more than 1000x speedup over CPU across all workloads, peaking at 2800x on 2D-Maze, and delivers geomean improvements of 8.8x speedup, 4.6x area efficiency, and 3.1x power efficiency over an FMT* ASIC baseline. The corresponding factors relative to a state-of-the-art RRT*-based MOPED accelerator are 8.6x, 1.0x, and 1.8x, at comparable path cost. To the best of our knowledge, ArboristAccel is the first dedicated hardware accelerator for FMT*-based motion planning.

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Yaotian Liu, Lingyi Huang, Zishen Wan, Bo Yuan, Cheng Tan, Jeff, Zhang. 2026-09-11. Arborist: Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design for Fast and Efficient Motion Planning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13420

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