FPGA based real-time visual servoing

Real-time image processing tasks not only require high computing power but also high data bandwidth. Though current processors excel in computing power, memory throughput is still the bottleneck for stream-oriented applications such as low-level image processing tasks. The alternative of special-purpose systems lacks flexibility at a high design effort and long development time. This effort often becomes void by the rapid advance of mainstream computing technology. FPGA technology promises flexibility and the necessary computing performance at affordable design costs. In this paper, we describe our approach for a prototype image processing system for robot vision applications, based on FPGA technology. We use a commercially available PCl-board to implement a typical application based on the experimental servicing satellite (ESS) scenario.