Analog VLSI for robot path planning

The use of analog VLSI as a convenient, high-performance engine for robot path planning is discussed. Laplace's equation is a useful formulation of the path planning problem, but digital solutions are very expensive. Since high precision is not required, an analog approach is attractive. A resistive network can be used to model the robot's domain with various boundary conditions for the source, target and obstacles. A gradient descent can then be traced through the network by comparing node voltages. Two VLSI chips have been designed using the MAGIC Tool Suite and have been fabricated in a 2- mu m, double-metal, single-poly digital CMOS process.<<ETX>>