Universal FPGA-Microcontroller Module for Autonomous Minirobots

Summary

This paper presents an extension turret for efficient data processing for autonomous minirobots, in particular the minirobot Khepera. The Khepera robot is a base platform of a mobile autonomous system for our experiments, but the robot’s main processor cannot accomplish complex processing tasks with real-time requirements, because of the processor’s low performance. Thus, we have designed an extension hardware module based on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to run the real-time processing and concurrently control other peripheral modules. The module with coupling of FPGA and a microcontroller gains robot’s ability and possesses FPGA’ flexibility of reconfiguration.