ECE Faculty Bo Yuan received NSF CAREER Award

ECE Assistant Professor Bo Yuan is the recipient of a new NSF CAREER award for the project titled "CAREER: SHF: Chimp: Algorithm-Hardware-Automation Co-Design Exploration of Real-Time Energy-Efficient Motion Planning." Dr. Bo Yuan is the PI on this five-year $500,000.00 project.
     
As the fundamental and critical robotic task for planning and deciding the actions of robots, motion planning is widely desired in many real-world applications, such as autonomous driving, in-warehouse package handling, assisted surgery etc. To date, there exists an increasing performance gap between the intensive computation of modern motion planning workloads and the insufficient support from general-purpose hardware, calling for efficient hardware acceleration to realize real-time energy-efficient high-quality planning. This project proposes Chimp, a cross-layer co-design framework for highly efficient motion planning processor. Chimp aims to develop a new design paradigm that can efficiently integrate domain expertise into learning-based motion planning, improving the planning reliability and performance. This project will significantly promote the intelligence and durability of modern autonomous systems, enhancing the economic opportunities in many fields such as autonomous driving, smart manufacturing, and intelligent healthcare.
 

More details on the project can be found on the NSF page here.

Congratulations to Bo!