Technical Report
cuRobo: Parallelized Collision-Free Minimum-Jerk Robot Motion Generation
Balakumar Sundaralingam, Siva Kumar Sastry Hari, Adam Fishman, Caelan Garrett, Karl Van Wyk, Valts Blukis, Alexander Millane, Helen Oleynikova, Ankur Handa, Fabio Ramos, Nathan Ratliff, Dieter Fox
This paper explores the problem of collision-free motion generation for manipulators by formulating it as a global motion optimization problem. We develop a parallel optimization technique to solve this problem and demonstrate its effectiveness on massively parallel GPUs. We show that combining simple optimization techniques with many parallel seeds leads to solving difficult motion generation problems within 50ms on average, 60x faster than state-of-the-art (SOTA) trajectory optimization methods. We achieve SOTA performance by combining L-BFGS step direction estimation with a novel parallel noisy line search scheme and a particle-based optimization solver. To further aid trajectory optimization, we develop a parallel geometric planner that is 101x faster than SOTA RRTConnect implementations and also introduce a collision-free IK solver that can solve over 7000 queries/s. We package our contributions into a state of the art GPU accelerated motion generation library, cuRobo and release it to enrich the robotics community.
Citation
@misc{curobo_report23,
title={cuRobo: Parallelized Collision-Free Minimum-Jerk Robot Motion Generation},
author={Balakumar Sundaralingam and Siva Kumar Sastry Hari and Adam Fishman and Caelan Garrett
and Karl Van Wyk and Valts Blukis and Alexander Millane and Helen Oleynikova and Ankur Handa
and Fabio Ramos and Nathan Ratliff and Dieter Fox},
year={2023},
eprint={2310.17274},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO}
}
An initial implementation of cuRobo without minimum jerk optimization was published at ICRA 2023, citation below
@INPROCEEDINGS{curobo_icra23,
author={Sundaralingam, Balakumar and Hari, Siva Kumar Sastry and
Fishman, Adam and Garrett, Caelan and Van Wyk, Karl and Blukis, Valts and
Millane, Alexander and Oleynikova, Helen and Handa, Ankur and
Ramos, Fabio and Ratliff, Nathan and Fox, Dieter},
booktitle={2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
title={CuRobo: Parallelized Collision-Free Robot Motion Generation},
year={2023},
volume={},
number={},
pages={8112-8119},
doi={10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10160765}}