# Group Marching Tree: Sampling-Based Approximately Optimal Motion Planning on GPUs

## TL;DR

The paper introduces GMT*, a GPU-accelerated sampling-based motion planning algorithm that achieves near-optimal solutions rapidly, enabling real-time planning in complex, dynamic environments with minimal performance loss.

## Contribution

GMT* modifies existing algorithms to enable highly parallel, efficient GPU implementation while maintaining asymptotic optimality, significantly speeding up motion planning tasks.

## Key findings

- Solutions found in ~10 ms on desktop GPU
- Solutions in ~30 ms on embedded GPU
- Effective planning within control loops at ~100 Hz

## Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach, named the Group Marching Tree (GMT*) algorithm, to planning on GPUs at rates amenable to application within control loops, allowing planning in real-world settings via repeated computation of near-optimal plans. GMT*, like the Fast Marching Tree (FMT) algorithm, explores the state space with a "lazy" dynamic programming recursion on a set of samples to grow a tree of near-optimal paths. GMT*, however, alters the approach of FMT with approximate dynamic programming by expanding, in parallel, the group of all active samples with cost below an increasing threshold, rather than only the minimum cost sample. This group approximation enables low-level parallelism over the sample set and removes the need for sequential data structures, while the "lazy" collision checking limits thread divergence---all contributing to a very efficient GPU implementation. While this approach incurs some suboptimality, we prove that GMT* remains asymptotically optimal up to a constant multiplicative factor. We show solutions for complex planning problems under differential constraints can be found in ~10 ms on a desktop GPU and ~30 ms on an embedded GPU, representing a significant speed up over the state of the art, with only small losses in performance. Finally, we present a scenario demonstrating the efficacy of planning within the control loop (~100 Hz) towards operating in dynamic, uncertain settings.