So obviously the computer vision part here is nothing novel, but also the algorithm itself seems like the kind of problem that computer game developers have likely solved a few hundred times already, thought nothing of it, and moved on.
Quickly generating time-optimal trajectories for under-actuated mechanical systems with actuator constraints is interesting, and as a researcher in this field I can assure you that the technique in this paper is novel and is interesting—if it were not it wouldn't have been published in the journal Science...