Online Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability Onboard the Robot Control Loop: A Real-Time GPU Solver for Safety-Critical Autonomy
Online Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability Onboard the Robot Control Loop: A Real-Time GPU Solver for Safety-Critical Autonomy
This paper introduces a CUDA implementation of a canonical Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs solver capable of computing backward reachable tubes (BRTs) for 2D, 3D, and 4D dynamics fast enough to run inside a robot's control loop. On a single NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada GPU using FP32, the system computes a 3D Air3D BRT at 112 Hz, significantly outperforming JAX and PyTorch reference implementations. The method also demonstrates compatibility with embedded hardware like the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor and includes an extension for multi-agent capture-basin tessellation in wildfire-response simulations.
The authors present a CUDA-based GPU solver for Hamilton-Jacobi reachability that achieves real-time performance (up to 112 Hz in 3D) within a robot control loop, offering formal safety guarantees as a deterministic complement to probabilistic autonomy stacks.
Source: arXiv Robotics — research abstracts · Read original article ↗
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What the source reports
Publisher-reported claims, with original evidence. These results have not been independently verified by RoboSignal.
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- Reported autonomousOpen source S1
Reported numbers
Hz
112
View original evidence
licies, a deterministic safety layer with formal guarantees is an essential complement. We present a CUDA implementation of the canonical WENO5 + TVD-RK3 + Lax-Friedrichs level-set Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs solver for 2D, 3D, and 4D dynamics that is fast enough to run inside a robot's control loop. In 32-bit floating point (FP32) on a single workstation GPU (NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada), it computes the 3D Air3D BRT at 112 Hz,
Open source S3Hz
66
View original evidence
x faster. On an embedded NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor it computes Air3D at 66 Hz (N=41) and the 2D drifter at 54 Hz, 3.8-8.9x faster than hj_reachability on the same device. As a multi-agent application, an in-kernel label-propagation extension recovers the K-agent capture-basin Voronoi tessellation from a single combined HJ solve, independent of fleet size; it runs at 4.0 ms per tick in a closed-loop wildfire-response sim
Open source S5Hz
54
View original evidence
x faster. On an embedded NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor it computes Air3D at 66 Hz (N=41) and the 2D drifter at 54 Hz, 3.8-8.9x faster than hj_reachability on the same device. As a multi-agent application, an in-kernel label-propagation extension recovers the K-agent capture-basin Voronoi tessellation from a single combined HJ solve, independent of fleet size; it runs at 4.0 ms per tick in a closed-loop wildfire-response sim
Open source S5ms
4
View original evidence
x faster. On an embedded NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor it computes Air3D at 66 Hz (N=41) and the 2D drifter at 54 Hz, 3.8-8.9x faster than hj_reachability on the same device. As a multi-agent application, an in-kernel label-propagation extension recovers the K-agent capture-basin Voronoi tessellation from a single combined HJ solve, independent of fleet size; it runs at 4.0 ms per tick in a closed-loop wildfire-response sim
Open source S5percent
0.04
View original evidence
a 4D pursuit-evasion BRT at 61 Hz, and a 2D wind-affected drifter BRT at 74-147 Hz, 5.9-17.5x faster than the JAX reference hj_reachability at matched precision and 1.7-16x faster than a torch.compile reimplementation of the same scheme. In 64-bit floating point (FP64) it agrees with hj_reachability on eight benchmark cases, reproduces Mitchell's Air3D BRT to within 0.04% of the reference cell count, and runs 2.0-4.6
Open source S4
- paper: not_reported
Source excerpts and review record
Automatically extracted; no manual editorial approval recorded.
Online Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability Onboard the Robot Control Loop: A Real-Time GPU Solver for Safety-Critical Autonomy
Open source S1
licies, a deterministic safety layer with formal guarantees is an essential complement. We present a CUDA implementation of the canonical WENO5 + TVD-RK3 + Lax-Friedrichs level-set Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs solver for 2D, 3D, and 4D dynamics that is fast enough to run inside a robot's control loop. In 32-bit floating point (FP32) on a single workstation GPU (NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada), it computes the 3D Air3D BRT at 112 Hz,
Open source S3
x faster. On an embedded NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor it computes Air3D at 66 Hz (N=41) and the 2D drifter at 54 Hz, 3.8-8.9x faster than hj_reachability on the same device. As a multi-agent application, an in-kernel label-propagation extension recovers the K-agent capture-basin Voronoi tessellation from a single combined HJ solve, independent of fleet size; it runs at 4.0 ms per tick in a closed-loop wildfire-response sim
Open source S5
a 4D pursuit-evasion BRT at 61 Hz, and a 2D wind-affected drifter BRT at 74-147 Hz, 5.9-17.5x faster than the JAX reference hj_reachability at matched precision and 1.7-16x faster than a torch.compile reimplementation of the same scheme. In 64-bit floating point (FP64) it agrees with hj_reachability on eight benchmark cases, reproduces Mitchell's Air3D BRT to within 0.04% of the reference cell count, and runs 2.0-4.6
Open source S4
Source：arXiv Robotics — research abstracts · arxiv.org