This past week I continued porting RRT to HLS. There are some constructs in our dense RRT that are not portable—namely the use of dynamic memory allocation in our implementation of A* search. Since all buffers need to have known size at compile time for hardware, we cannot have unbounded queues/stacks that one would normally use in conventional search algorithms. Thus, we have been trying to implement SMA*, a memory-bounded version of A*. We are doing this in software, and once that is done I will port it to HLS.
Again this week I have not been able to meet with the AMD rep, and so our plan for the interim demo is to either integrate everything with the Ultra96, or simply demonstrate the stages of our system separately if we are not able to integrate.
If we cannot get integration done, then at least for the accelerator we can get it to take in a file containing perception data, process it, and then have it write a file with a motion plan; this would be a very rough demo, showing off only the individual components. We would then have to manually transfer the motion plan and do inverse kinematics on it separately (on our laptops for example) and then manually send the commands to the robot. For interim demo at least, this should suffice.