SHARP: Supercomputing for High-Speed Avoidance and Reactive Planning

Abstract

This paper presents SHARP (Supercomputing for High-speed Avoidance and Reactive Planning), a proof-of- concept study demonstrating how high-performance computing (HPC) can enable millisecond-scale responsiveness in robotic control. While modern robots face increasing demands for reactivity in human–robot shared workspaces, onboard pro- cessors are constrained by size, power, and cost. Offloading to HPC offers massive parallelism for trajectory planning, but its feasibility for real-time robotics remains uncertain due to network latency and jitter. We evaluate SHARP in a stress-test scenario where a 7-DOF manipulator must dodge high-speed foam projectiles. Using a hash-distributed multi-goal A* search implemented with MPI on both local and remote HPC clusters, the system achieves mean planning latencies of 22.9 ms (local) and 30.0 ms (remote, 300 km away), with avoidance success rates of 84% and 88%, respectively. These results show that when round-trip latency remains within the tens-of-milliseconds regime, HPC-side computation is no longer the bottleneck, enabling avoidance well below human reaction times. The SHARP results motivate hybrid control architectures: low-level reflexes remain onboard for safety, while bursty, high-throughput planning tasks are offloaded to HPC for scalability. By reporting per-stage timing and success rates, this study provides a reproducible template for assessing the real-time feasibility of HPC-driven robotics. Collectively, SHARP reframes HPC offloading as a viable pathway toward dependable, reactive robots in dynamic environments.