Efficient Controller Implementations for Robot Control

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have emerged as the platform of choice for the rapid prototyping and testing of hardware circuits. The dynamic creation of hardware circuits in FPGAs provides an efficient mechanism for customizing the hardware for specific task objectives. The ability of these devices to be reprogrammed during run-time enables the hardware circuitry to adapt to changing task requirements and to accommodate system faults. In this paper, the use of FPGAs in implementing different behaviors and controllers for a mobile robot application is presented. It is shown that the computational hardware can be optimized for each task and sophisticated behaviors and controllers implemented in an efficient manner. The proposed approach is validated through a case study where a robot is configured to meet application specific requirements and the controllers on this robot are modified dynamically using Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs. Key-Words: FPGA, reconfiguration, fault tolerance, controllers for mobile robots.