Fast RTL Implementation of A* Path Planning Algorithm

The conventional A* algorithm consumes a lot of time due to its large number of iterations. In every iteration, the memory is accessed for multiple data structures, functions are evaluated then sorted into queues which makes it sometimes not suitable for real-time applications. This paper proposes a fast implementation for the A* algorithm to meet requirements of real-time applications. The proposed implementation uses parallelism and caching to achieve better performance. We used Register Transfer Level (RTL) simulation and formal verification to do functional verification of the implemented design.The design is implemented on Xilinx Virtex-7 to be evaluated. Experiments prove that this implementation achieves 100 times enhancement for low obstacle maps and 50 times for high ones relative to software implementation. The design is suitable for real-time applications.