Hardware/Software FPGA Architecture for Robotics Applications

Abstract

This work presents a Hardware/Software FPGA Robotics Architecture for applications on Mobile Robotics. A test mobile robot was built and it is based in a commercial programmable robot called Create from iRobot, also the test platform has additional components like sonars, infrared sensors and a robotic arm, these components are used to increase robot’s functionality and to show that it is feasible to build any kind of hybrid robot. The Hardware/Software Architecture is a complete Embedded System (ES). Hardware side includes processor, buses, memory and peripherals like co-processors, sensors, robotic arm, controllers, UARTs, etc., Software side includes a Linux OS with a set of libraries that performs different functionalities and to control all components in FPGA, these functions are easy-understanding for robotic programmers. The main purpose of this work is to show the advantages of using FPGAs to implement Robotics Platforms. Some of these advantages are parallelism, flexibility and scalability. Finally some experiments was performed to show these advantages.