This article presents an approach for mapping real-time applications based on particle filters (PFs) to heterogeneous reconfigurable systems, which typically consist of multiple FPGAs and CPUs. A method is proposed to adapt the number of particles dynamically and to utilise runtime reconfigurability of FPGAs for reduced power and energy consumption. A data compression scheme is employed to reduce communication overhead between FPGAs and CPUs. A mobile robot localisation and tracking application is developed to illustrate our approach. Experimental results show that the proposed adaptive PF can reduce up to 99% of computation time. Using runtime reconfiguration, we achieve a 25% to 34% reduction in idle power. A 1U system with four FPGAs is up to 169 times faster than a single-core CPU and 41 times faster than a 1U CPU server with 12 cores. It is also estimated to be 3 times faster than a system with four GPUs
