Design and implementation of fpga soft processor for holonomic robot low level control

The initial problem on building a mobile robot using embedded system is the hardware flexibility. Currently most of mobile robots use microcontroller. The weakness of building mobile robot using microcontroller is the form and the specification which is inflexible to be added or changed. For that reason this research use FPGA soft processor to design a hardware architecture in the form of system on chip (SoC) as the motor velocity control and robot heading. We divide the mobile robot control into 2 levels which are high level and low level control. High level control is including the positioning and path tracking, while low level control is including kinematic, speed control, heading lock and communication. This research focused on low level control design. The achieved result with the use of FPGA soft processor, is that the programmer can flexibly add and change the hardware architecture and faster program execution resulted from parallel process. On the motor velocity testing, the time to get back into the steady state after receiving disturbance was about 0.6 seconds. On the heading lock testing, the time of the robot to get back into the set point is around 1 second. Resources required to implement soft processor system are 3883 slices register, 1130 slices flip-flop, 3825 slices LUTs and 191 RAM Blocks.