FPGA-based cooperative control of indoor multiple robots

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.