FPGA Implementation of A∗ Algorithm for Real-Time Path Planning

Abstract

The traditional A∗ algorithm is time-consuming due to a large number of iteration operations to calculate the evaluation function and sort the OPEN list. To achieve real-time path-planning performance, a hardware accelerator’s architecture called A∗ accelerator has been designed and implemented in field programmable gate array (FPGA). The specially designed 8-port cache and OPEN list array are introduced to tackle the calculation bottleneck. The system-on-a-chip (SOC) design is implemented in Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA to evaluate A∗ accelerator. Experiments show that the hardware accelerator achieves 37–75 times performance enhancement relative to software implementation. It is suitable for real-time path-planning applications.

FPGA implementation in mobile robot applications: State of the art review

“…Experiments demonstrate that the proposed hardware accelerator improves efficiency by 37-75 times compared to a software implementation. It is appropriate for applications involving real-time route planning (Zhou et al, 2020).…”