Design and implementation of embedded tracking system using spatial parallelism on FPGA for robotics

Abstract

The robot tracking system is one type of utilization system on a mobile robot and generally utilized as a part of numerous perspectives, for example, security or military. In this project, an active and passive robot tracking system used FPGA platform was implemented. The robot can identify and track objects by using Infrared (IR) and thermal sensors. Perception approach and motion planning is the most essential part in this project .Two long range IR sensors utilized for the tracking process to distinguish any moving object and two contactless temperature sensor (TMP007) for detected the temperature objects while a ultrasonic sensor as the obstacle avoidance sensor . The project platform was the DE0-Nano board and the characteristic of FPGA offer programmability and makes it easier to implement on different mobile robot platforms. Sensors and robot platform was integrated with the DE0-Nano board. A structure VHDL coding was used for design the robot tracking system and Quartus II 13.0sp1 as a development CAD tool. The implementation of complex tracking system with FPGA platform (DE0-Nano) was possible because of the rich logic elements, a specific sensors characteristics testing and robot stability was carried out to master those sensors and robot. The result for this project was shown the frequency for DE0-nano achieved up to 1.3 GHz, also the total logic elements were used for this project is 8,045 and shown the output reading voltage of the IR sensor is high reflectivity for the white colour object compared to another colours like blue and black, also the detection distance for contactless sensor was 15cm. Hence, using the FPGA technology improved the performance of implemented system.