GPU-Based Dynamic Search on Adaptive Resolution Grids

This paper presents a GPU-based wave-front propagation technique for multi-agent path planning in extremely large, complex, dynamic environments. Our work proposes an adaptive subdivision of the environment with efficient indexing, update, and neighbor-finding operations on the GPU to address several known limitations in prior work. In particular, an adaptive environment representation reduces the device memory requirements by an order of magnitude which enables for the first time, GPU-based goal path planning in truly large-scale environments (\u3e 2048 m2 ) for hundreds of agents with different targets. We compare our approach to prior work that uses an uniform grid on several challenging navigation benchmarks and report significant memory savings, and up to a 1000X computational speedup

Self-adapting structuring and representation of space

The objective of this report is to propose a syntactic formalism for space representation. Beside the well known advantages of hierarchical data structure, the underlying approach has the additional strength of self-adapting to a spatial structure at hand. The formalism is called puzzletree because its generation results in a number of blocks which in a certain order -- like a puzzle - reconstruct the original space. The strength of the approach does not lie only in providing a compact representation of space (e.g. high compression), but also in attaining an ideal basis for further knowledge-based modeling and recognition of objects. The approach may be applied to any higher-dimensioned space (e.g. images, volumes). The report concentrates on the principles of puzzletrees by explaining the underlying heuristic for their generation with respect to 2D spaces, i.e. images, but also schemes their application to volume data. Furthermore, the paper outlines the use of puzzletrees to facilitate higher-level operations like image segmentation or object recognition. Finally, results are shown and a comparison to conventional region quadtrees is done