Parallel Collision Queries on the GPU

We present parallel algorithms to accelerate collision tests of rigid body objects for a high number of independent transformations as they occur in sampling-based motion planning and path validation problems. We compare various GPU approaches with a different level of parallelism against each other and against a parallel CPU implementation. Our algorithms require no sophisticated load balancing schemes. They make no assumption on the distribution of the input transformations and require no pre-processing. Yet, we can perform up to 1 million collision tests per second with our best GPU implementation in our benchmarks. This is about 2.5X faster than our reference multi-core CPU implementati…