Design of a flexible reconfigurable mobile robot localization system using FPGA technology

Mobile robot activities have variable computational requirements according to various parameters related to the robotic applications behaviour and the robot dynamic environment. This high variability puts many challenges for a complete robot navigation system design. With their high flexibility, reconfigurable architectures are a suitable choice to design such dynamic system. Mobile robot navigation steps (perception, localization, obstacle avoidance and path planning) are extremely complex to be embedded in a complete navigation controller. In this paper, we presented a generic and a flexible platform based on FPGA technology, for studying and prototyping complete unified robot navigation system. We exploited the dynamic reconfiguration mechanism that allows modifying the navigation controller according to different navigation algorithm requirements. We showed the effectiveness of this platform in the localization step. We have a dynamic reconfigurable system that switches between three different localization techniques to satisfy energy/surface ratio and exploit the released resources to implement other robot tasks.