Exploration of the power-performance tradeoff through parameterization of FPGA-based multiprocessor systems

The design space of FPGA-based processor systems is huge, because many parameters can be modified at design- and runtime to achieve an efficient system solution in terms of performance, power and energy consumption. Such parameters are, for example, the number of processors and their configurations, the clock frequencies at design time, the use of dynamic frequency scaling at runtime, the application task distribution, and the FPGA type and size. The major contribution of this paper is the exploration of all these parameters and their impact on performance, power dissipation, and energy consumption for four different application scenarios. The goal is to introduce a first approach for a developer's guideline, supporting the choice of an optimized and specific system parameterization for a target application on FPGA-based multiprocessor systems-on-chip. The FPGAs used for these explorations were Xilinx Virtex-4 and Xilinx Virtex-5. The performance results were measured on the FPGA while the power consumption was estimated using the Xilinx X Power Analyzer tool. Finally, a novel runtime adaptive multiprocessor architecture for dynamic clock frequency scaling is introduced and used for the performance, power and energy consumption evaluations

Development of a robotic hand using bioinspired optimization for mechanical and control design : UnB-hand

For the last four decades, the development of robotic hands has been the focus of several works. However, a small part of those approaches consider the exploitation of parallelism of FPGA-based (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) systems or discuss how using bioinspired optimization algorithms could improve the mechanical and controller components. This work considers developing a bioinspired robotic hand that achieves motion and force control with a logic hardware architecture implemented in FPGA intended to be replicated and executed with suitable parallelism, fitting a single device. The developed robotic hand prototype has five fingers and seven DoF (Degrees of Freedom). Using bioinspired optimization, such as PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization), both the rigid finger mechanism and the impedance controller were optimized and incorporated the results in several practical grasping experiments. The validation of this work is done with the Cutkosky grasping taxonomy and some grasping experiments with interference. The tests proved the proficiency of this works for a wide range of power and some precision grasp. The reader can see the experiments in the attached videos

A methodology to design a domotics human-machine interface for visually impaired people

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than one billion people in the world have some disability. A 2017 report of the Brazilian Geography and Statistics Institute (IBGE) shows that 45.6 million Brazilians have an impairment, among which 18.8 million declare vision issues not fixed by glasses or contact lenses. So, a significant population leads to developing many legal mechanisms to guarantee their quality-of-life. Potentially, these mechanisms should regulate many aspects of urban design to assure the accessibility of any environment. However, there are several design challenges to be overcome. In this paper, we address the problem of developing Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) for visually impaired people, focusing on residential automation systems (domotics). The efficient development of such interfaces needs a link among two accessibility areas: domotics and HMI. We used pre-tests, human-computer interaction (HCI) techniques, and the user's emotional state identification to determine the user's profile. We must highlight that the design is intended to be used by any user, visually impaired or not. That is, the system should be universal. The methodology described can be used to assess the efficiency and quality metrics of accessibility in domotics systems