Reconfigurable Analog VLSI circuits for robot path planning

This paper presents robot path planning using reconfigurable Analog-Very-Large-Scale-Integrated (AVLSI) circuits. Existing research has shown that custom AVLSI circuits known as application-specific-integrated-circuits (ASICs) can theoretically be used for robot path planning. There are two main drawbacks to using custom ASICs: (1) circuit designs are fixed to some extent (not changeable) and (2) long design cycle/fabrication time (order of months). Reconfigurable analog circuits called Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAAs) have been used to implement a variety of AVLSI circuits in a short time (order of minutes). This paper presents initial hardware results using reconfigurable AVLSI circuits developed at Georgia Tech to implement a robot path planning algorithm. A simple toy problem is presented as a proof of concept.