Robotic Computing On Fpgas

This book provides a thorough overview of the state-of-the-art field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based robotic computing accelerator designs and summarizes their adopted optimized techniques. This book consists of ten chapters, delving into the details of how FPGAs have been utilized in robotic perception, localization, planning, and multi-robot collaboration tasks. In addition to individual robotic tasks, this book provides detailed descriptions of how FPGAs have been used in robotic products, including commercial autonomous vehicles and space exploration robots.

This book presents hardware-efficient algorithms and FPGA implementations for two robotic tasks, namely exploration and landmark determination. The work identifies scenarios for mobile robotics where parallel processing and selective shutdown offered by FPGAs are invaluable. The book proceeds to systematically develop memory-driven VLSI architectures for both the tasks. The architectures are ported to a low-cost FPGA with a fairly small number of system gates.

This book provides a thorough overview of the state-of-the-art field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based robotic computing accelerator designs and summarizes their adopted optimized techniques. This book consists of ten chapters, delving into the details of how FPGAs have been utilized in robotic perception, localization, planning, and multi-robot collaboration tasks. In addition to individual robotic tasks, this book provides detailed descriptions of how FPGAs have been used in robotic products, including commercial autonomous vehicles and space exploration robots.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Applied Reconfigurable Computing, ARC 2009, held in Karlsruhe, Germany, in March 2009. The 21 full papers and 21 short papers presented together with the abstracts of 3 keynote lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from about 100 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on FPGA security and bitstream analysis, fault tolerant systems, architectures, place and route techniques, cryptography, and resource allocation and scheduling, as well as on applications.

This invaluable book comprehensively describes evolutionary robotics and computational intelligence, and how different computational intelligence techniques are applied to robotic system design. It embraces the most widely used evolutionary approaches with their merits and drawbacks, presents some related experiments for robotic behavior evolution and the results achieved, and shows promising future research directions. Clarity of explanation is emphasized such that a modest knowledge of basic evolutionary computation, digital circuits and engineering design will suffice for a thorough understanding of the material.The book is ideally suited to computer scientists, practitioners and researchers keen on computational intelligence techniques, especially the evolutionary algorithms in autonomous robotics at both the hardware and software levels.

This book covers all aspects of robot intelligence from perception at sensor level and reasoning at cognitive level to behavior planning at execution level for each low level segment of the machine. It also presents the technologies for cognitive reasoning, social interaction with humans, behavior generation, ability to cooperate with other robots, ambience awareness, and an artificial genome that can be passed on to other robots. These technologies are to materialize cognitive intelligence, social intelligence, behavioral intelligence, collective intelligence, ambient intelligence and genetic intelligence. The book aims at serving researchers and practitioners with a timely dissemination of the recent progress on robot intelligence technology and its applications, based on a collection of papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RiTA), held in Beijing, China, November 6 - 8, 2014. For better readability, this edition has the total 74 papers grouped into 3 chapters: Chapter I: Ambient, Behavioral, Cognitive, Collective, and Social Robot Intelligence, Chapter II: Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Design for Advanced Robotics, Chapter III: Applications of Robot Intelligence Technology, where individual chapters, edited respectively by Peter Sincak, Hyun Myung, Jun Jo along with Weimin Yang and Jong-Hwan Kim, begin with a brief introduction written by the respective chapter editors.

This book summarizes the key scientific outcomes of the Horizon 2020 research project TULIPP: Towards Ubiquitous Low-power Image Processing Platforms. The main focus lies on the development of high-performance, energy-efficient embedded systems for the growing range of increasingly complex image processing applications. The holistic TULIPP approach is described in the book, which addresses hardware platforms, programming tools and embedded operating systems. Several of the results are available as open-source hardware/software for the community. The results are evaluated with several use cases taken from real-world applications in key domains such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), robotics, space and medicine. Discusses the development of high-performance, energy-efficient embedded systems for the growing range of increasingly complex image processing applications; Covers the hardware architecture of embedded image processing systems, novel methods, tools and libraries for programming those systems as well as embedded operating systems to manage those systems; Demonstrates results with several challenging applications, such as medical systems, robotics, drones and automotive.

Robotics and control are both research and application domains that have been frequently engineered through the use of interdisciplinary approaches like cybernetics. Cognition is a particular concept of this approach, abstracted from the context of living organisms to that of artificial devices, and is concerned with knowledge acquisition and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. Cognitive robotics and control refer to knowledge processing as much as knowledge generation from problem understanding, leading to special forms of architectures that enable systems to behave in an autonomous way. The main aim of this book is to highlight emerging applications and address recent breakthroughs in the domain of cognitive robotics and control and related areas. Procedures, algorithms, architectures, and implementations for reasoning, problem solving, or decision making are considered in the domain of robotics and control.

Dr Donald Bailey starts with introductory material considering the problem of embedded image processing, and how some of the issues may be solved using parallel hardware solutions. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are introduced as a technology that provides flexible, fine-grained hardware that can readily exploit parallelism within many image processing algorithms. A brief review of FPGA programming languages provides the link between a software mindset normally associated with image processing algorithms, and the hardware mindset required for efficient utilization of a parallel hardware design. The design process for implementing an image processing algorithm on an FPGA is compared with that for a conventional software implementation, with the key differences highlighted. Particular attention is given to the techniques for mapping an algorithm onto an FPGA implementation, considering timing, memory bandwidth and resource constraints, and efficient hardware computational techniques. Extensive coverage is given of a range of low and intermediate level image processing operations, discussing efficient implementations and how these may vary according to the application. The techniques are illustrated with several example applications or case studies from projects or applications he has been involved with. Issues such as interfacing between the FPGA and peripheral devices are covered briefly, as is designing the system in such a way that it can be more readily debugged and tuned. Provides a bridge between algorithms and hardware Demonstrates how to avoid many of the potential pitfalls Offers practical recommendations and solutions Illustrates several real-world applications and case studies Allows those with software backgrounds to understand efficient hardware implementation Design for Embedded Image Processing on FPGAs is ideal for researchers and engineers in the vision or image processing industry, who are looking at smart sensors, machine vision, and robotic vision, as well as FPGA developers and application engineers. The book can also be used by graduate students studying imaging systems, computer engineering, digital design, circuit design, or computer science. It can also be used as supplementary text for courses in advanced digital design, algorithm and hardware implementation, and digital signal processing and applications. Companion website for the book: www.wiley.com/go/bailey/fpga

I. ALEKSANDER Kobler Unit for Information Technology Management, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, England It is now over half a decade since Joseph Engelberger wrote: 'Given a six-articulation arm of any configuration, software can be powerful enough to think only in tool coordinates. That is, a programmer concerns himself only with the tool on the end of the robot arm. He can think of the tool's frame of reference and com puter subroutines automatically make the various articulations move so as to accomplish the desired tool manipulation. ' As is often the case with statements of this kind, they are appealing and generally well-founded in technological feasibility. But in order to turn the prediction into reality it requires the dedication and in ventiveness of an international community of researchers. The object of this book is to provide a window on to some of the advances made by this community which go towards the fulfilment of Engelberger's predictions. A significant factor in the framework within which this work is being pursued is the phenomenal advance in the availability of inex pensive and highly compact computing power. It becomes increas ingly possible to imagine powerful microprocessors providing local intelligence at key points in a robot arm Uoints, gripper, etc) by being connected through a communications network and controlled by some specially designated supervisory microchip.