An agent-based mobile robot system using configurable SOC technique

To make a mobile robot with real-time vision system adapt to the highly dynamic environments and emergencies under the real-time constraints, a significant account of processing power is needed. Instead of pushing the limit of software development and computational resources, and to reduce the system computation time and improve system fault-tolerance, this paper presents an embedded platform which can dynamically reconfigure a mobile robot system on the fly by integrating Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and embedded processors in a system-on-chip (SOC) environment. The BDI agent model is adopted as the unified agent structure, which significantly simplify the HW/SW partitioning and communication. A self-reconfigurable platform is also proposed to improve the hardware flexibility. This proposed embedded framework has been applied to a real-world mobile robot, and the experimental results demonstrate its feasibility and efficiency.