An FPGA Dynamically Reconfigurable Framework for Modular Robotics.

Abstract

Dynamic Reconfiguration has always constituted a challenge for embedded systems designers. Nowadays, technological developments make possible to do it on Xilinx FPGAs, but setting up a dynamically reconfigurable system remains a painful and complicated task. In this paper we propose a framework for performing it in an easy way, for a specific application: Modular Robotics. We propose an architecture containing a Microblaze processor and a reconfigurable module. The module is defined in VHDL and synthesized by the user; then we provide the scripts for easily generating the corresponding configuration bitstreams for a dynamic partial reconfigurable controller for our Modular Robot. The proposed framework is easily extendable to other applications.