Design and test of a new development FPGA board for mobile robot research

Abstract

This paper presents the design and testing of a newly developed field programmable gate array (FPGA) board for mobile robot research. The idea consists of interfacing the FPGA to a 16-bit digital signal controller (dsPIC). This idea enables the FPGA designs to communicate with the dsPIC through the integration of per-written driver modules to be used in a wide variety of digital and analog peripheral modules. It also allows the use of a high-performance digital signal processing core in many signal processing-based mobile robot applications. The proposed FPGA board allows users to develop, test, and deploy quick and cost-effective complete design solutions to control the entire robot system in various applications without the need for external components.