Design And Implementation Of Multi-microprocessors Based Control Chip For Robot

Swarm intelligence is a heuristic approach which is a kind of Artificial Intelligence. It does research in seeking a solution of combining the basic behaviors of individuals in swarm to achieve the emergence of high-level behavior or the completion of large-scale tasks. Swarm robots are the hardware platform of swarm intelligence. It is necessary for swarm robots to fit the requirements like simple, efficient and able to run primitives of system from the research of swarm intelligence. However, the ARM chip based control system of robot which is widely used at present has several problems. For example, it is redundantly structured and the extremely complex instruction set and interrupts lead to a difficult process to debug it, and the most important is that the packaged chip makes it impossible to change the internal structure with different needs. In a foreseeable view, in order to make swarm robots working better with the algorithm of swarm intelligence. A more simple, efficient and variable control system is needed.This project comes from National Natural Science Foundation program"The network environment based on swarm intelligence approach Platform"and"Dynamic binary translation implemented by software and hardware codesign methodology in heterogeneous network environment", it is committed to developing a new control system of robot with our own processors and peripheral signal processing modules. This article has already finished the basic requirements of the project. It has implemented a control chip of robot using FPGA with several capabilities as controlling the movement and sensory of robot, communicating with outside and updating program of robot. The main work is as follows:(1) In order to abstract the common features of heterogeneous structured robot control unit, this paper propose a mathematical model of behavioral control of robot.(2) This paper has implemented the mathematical model of behavioral control by software and hardware codesign methodology on FPGA. The achieved model is based on double microprocessors architecture and communication model with FIFO queue, it is able to generate and process the signals of robot, transfer data with PC using UART interface and support for behavior-based program update.(3) This paper has built a circuit to connect the FPGA with the robot.(4) This paper has finished the verification and performance evaluation of the completed system.Through the validation experiments, the implemented system in this paper performs correctly with the movement control of robot as expected. The smaller resources it occupied is consistent with the simple, efficient design in advance. The experimental results show it is very suitable for swarm robots, because it can significantly reduce the communication volume when updating program happens in swarm robots.