Slope-based point pursuing maneuvers of nonholonomic robots using FPGA

Steering maneuver is essential in robotic motion planning. Despite a lot of steering mechanisms successfully developed in past years, for miniature robots, real-time computation is still a limitation for robot path tracking. The design issues in cooperative control of battery-powered nonholonomic robots rest with the complicacy of the control strategies, the low power consumption and real-time processing capability. Conventionally, the improvement of computing speed mostly relies on the increment of the system clock and often results in some transient loss. Thus, an elaborate control algorithm developed for PC might not work on an embedded system. This paper presents a comprehensive steering algorithm which, via issuing predicaments for computation, will dramatically reduce the resource usage in hardware circuit design. The proposed algorithm is implemented on an embedded system for ubiquitous robotics using the field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. ©2010 IEEE