An Embedded Computing Platform for Robot

As the robotic industry is growing boomingly, the functionalities and system's architecture of robots are more and more complex. The development of robotic application system becomes a time-consuming and difficult task. In this paper, we propose an embedded computing platform for intelligent robot, and then design a reliable real-time operating system (RTOS) on the platform for rapid developing intelligent robotic applications. The proposed embedded computing platform includes a reconfigurable 8-bits processor core and some robot-dedicated hardware intellectual property (IP) which can be generated and reconfigured easily. Based on the embedded processor core, a real-time OS, uC/OS-II, is ported to this platform. The RTOS is adjusted and optimized due to the robot-specific requirements and the hardware resources constrains. Finally, a simple example is applied to demonstrate the software/hardware (SW/HW) co-design flow based on the proposed platform.