Title: FPGA-based cooperative control of indoor multiple robots

Authors: Quang Phuc Ha; Ying-Hao Yu; Nguyen Khanh Quang

Addresses: Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, P.O. Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Sydney, Australia ' College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Chung Yuan Christian University, Chung Li City, 32023, Taiwan ' Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, P.O. Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Sydney, Australia

Abstract: Cooperative control of a group of mobile robots remains a challenging topic in robotics. In the emerging trend of ubiquitous robotics, real-time control using vision-based surveillance strategies requires embedded systems with limited computational performance and energy saving. In this paper, a control-system-on-chip architecture is developed for coordination of control of an indoor robotic formation by using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. The prototype features capabilities of colour-based motion object tracking, inter-robot distance estimation, trajectory estimation, velocity control, formation initialisation and maintenance. All algorithms are implemented in pure register-transfer and gate-level circuits with localisation from a global monocular camera. Experiment results are included for miniature robots deployed in a line formation. The FPGA's resource usage and power consumption are analysed to show efficiency of the proposed approach.

Keywords: field programmable gate arrays; FPGA; perspective projection image ratio; PPIR; slope-based arc-line-arc turning; robotic formation; mobile robots; cooperating robots; robot cooordination; multiple robots; multi-robot systems; indoor robots; robot control; system-on-chip; SoC; monocular cameras; robot vision; miniature robots; colour-based tracking; robot motion; object tracking; distance estimation; trajectory estimation; velocity control; formation initialisation; formation maintenance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAMECHS.2012.052220

International Journal of Advanced Mechatronic Systems, 2012 Vol.4 No.5/6, pp.248 - 259

Published online: 30 Aug 2014 *

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