Design Of A Modular Mobile Robot Platform Based On ARM+FPGA

As a focus, the research on mobile robot had been hot for a long time. A number ofuseful mobile robots which has been wide used in industry, agriculture and daily life wereinvested by many research institutes and corporations which used a lot of human resources,time and money to develop. Wheeled mobile robot as one of the most importantimplementation ways of mobile robot, after years of development, researcher andmanufacturers have designed and produced various sorts of wheeled mobile robots to solvethese real existent problems. However, these research and development are carried out forindependence, so the development of the mobile robot is often to solve a specific class ofproblems, if there is a new demand, we need re-design architecture, hardware and software.In this thesis, it analysis the mobile robot design principles from top to down andsummaris the mobile robot every parts’ needs layer by layer. It presentsa modular, reconfigurable on demand fast design method for mobile robot platform reducethe researchers and users in the design and assembly robots consume time and costs,improve the robot’s hardware components and module reuse rate. In the thesis, the design ofmobile robot is divided into three parts: architecture, hardware and software. Themechanical architecture is based on a4-wheel driving robot classis. Hardware andsoftware is divided into three layers: sensor and driver layer, real time control layer (powermanagement system) and high performance processing layer. Each layer is basedon needs within the modular planning and design, estimated mobile robot platformcan quickly increase or decrease according to user needs and the number of module types.Real time control layer is the core layer of the mobile robot system which uses an ARM7microcontroller and a high performance FPGA constituting the core processing unit. Itexpands enough memory resources to meet the performance requirements of processors. Atthe same time, the layer is equipped with embedded communication protocol commonly used interface, and the necessary peripherals. In sensor and driver layer, a common userinterface is designed to facilitate the increase or decrease of sensors and drivers. Highperformance processing layer is an extended layer for the system. It uses the latesthigh-performance embedded device as a core processor, and communicates with real timecontrol layer from the high speed communication interface. After setting up the mobilerobot platform, the thesis does series of tests and experiments to detect the functions andperformance of the wheeled mobile robot.