| Summary: |
The goal of the project is to build a small but very flexible robot with minimalist pin-count.
The robot is to be based on a single but powerful FPGA board capable of carrying a soft core processor (the SUZAKU board mentioned in the budget). The board also carries Flash and RAM for ease of operation and delivers support for the Linux operating system.
This means that the students that will use the robot after the completion of this project will be programming a robot under a normal Linux operating system which delivers great growth potential to this robot - future upgrades will want to include vision sensing.
Additional use for the FPGA is to read several sensors, command actuators and other real time tasks. Actuators are standard H bridges to drive the motors.
A number of sensors are mentioned in the budget but reading the two encoders associated with the motors require special care and correct management under tight real time constraints The rest of the sensors have to be read and measurements fed into the processing core.
Other real time tasks like communications and/or debugging may, if necessary, receive additional support from the FPGA core to ease processing of the soft core.
The shown sensor mount is intended for participation in the national robotic fire fighting competition in Guarda. This robots competing generally have on board PCs that make them bulky and need large batteries.
One of the intents of this project is to have large reconfigurable computing power with low power consumption in order to have a lighter robot with lighter batteries that last longer.
While Innovative, this robot is thought to be competitive for several robotic competitions after the completion of this project. The intent of the investigation is to ascertain the amount of computing power that the soft core will effectively deliver.
Future follow ups of this project will include vision processing.
If this project is fully successful, future robots in competitions will  |
Summary
The goal of the project is to build a small but very flexible robot with minimalist pin-count.
The robot is to be based on a single but powerful FPGA board capable of carrying a soft core processor (the SUZAKU board mentioned in the budget). The board also carries Flash and RAM for ease of operation and delivers support for the Linux operating system.
This means that the students that will use the robot after the completion of this project will be programming a robot under a normal Linux operating system which delivers great growth potential to this robot - future upgrades will want to include vision sensing.
Additional use for the FPGA is to read several sensors, command actuators and other real time tasks. Actuators are standard H bridges to drive the motors.
A number of sensors are mentioned in the budget but reading the two encoders associated with the motors require special care and correct management under tight real time constraints The rest of the sensors have to be read and measurements fed into the processing core.
Other real time tasks like communications and/or debugging may, if necessary, receive additional support from the FPGA core to ease processing of the soft core.
The shown sensor mount is intended for participation in the national robotic fire fighting competition in Guarda. This robots competing generally have on board PCs that make them bulky and need large batteries.
One of the intents of this project is to have large reconfigurable computing power with low power consumption in order to have a lighter robot with lighter batteries that last longer.
While Innovative, this robot is thought to be competitive for several robotic competitions after the completion of this project. The intent of the investigation is to ascertain the amount of computing power that the soft core will effectively deliver.
Future follow ups of this project will include vision processing.
If this project is fully successful, future robots in competitions will be smaller, lighter and smarter because they are easier to program.
This project is the result of merging the knowledge of different sections inside the UP/FEUP/DEEC: the FPGA knowledge is brought by Prof João Paulo Canas Ferreira and robotics knowledge is brought by Prof. Armando Jorge Sousa that has experience in robotics competitions and supervising students in competitions.
The project is very interesting to the student selected because he has previously tried to compete on robotics contests and is aware of the difficulties of other technological approaches.
The project is to be completed outside classes.
All necessary software to program the FPGA and the robot is freely available by FEUP campus license agreements. |