Hardware/Software FPGA Architecture for Robotics Applications

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 axe 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