Graph Inspection for Robotic Motion Planning: Do Arithmetic Circuits Help?

Abstract

We investigate whether algorithms based on arithmetic circuits are a viable alternative to existing solvers for Graph Inspection, a problem with direct application in robotic motion planning. Specifically, we seek to address the high memory usage of existing solvers. Aided by novel theoretical results enabling fast solution recovery, we implement a circuit-based solver for Graph Inspection which uses only polynomial space and test it on several realistic robotic motion planning datasets. In particular, we provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation of a suite of engineered algorithms for three key subroutines. While this evaluation demonstrates that circuit-based methods are not yet practically competitive for our robotics application, it also provides insights which may guide future efforts to bring circuit-based algorithms from theory to practice.