JIFFE: A Just Incredibly Fast Floating-point Engine for Robotics Algorithms

Robotics algorithms have a seemingly insatiable demand for computer cycles - to improve accuracy during motion, to implement sophisticated force control schemes, and to plan fast, safe trajectories. Robotics algorithms are poor matches to array processors because the arrays are very small and frequent zeroes and ones imply that the expanded scalar form has many fewer operations. Current scalar processors, such as the 68020/68881, use relatively slow iterative compute engines - and can't even deliver that performance because of high instruction and argument overheads.