The Hardware Design Of ARM-based Chinese-Chess Robot Control System

An Intelligent Chinese chess playing robot which is one of entertainment robots integrates multi-disciplinary technologies like image processing and pattern recognition, artificial Intelligence, robotics and intelligent control technology. The configuration of robot is mainly composed of three modules:ARM-based control and management module, DSP-based image acquisition and processing module and motion control module. DSP-based image acquisition and processing module acquires chessboard, chess pieces and ambient environmental information using CCD camera. The images are processed by a series of image processing procedures and pattern recognition to obtain necessary information such as3D coordinates of the moving chess piece. The result can be then transferred to ARM control and management module through HPI interface. The control module made a decision based on sensory information and playing algorithm to generate a reasonable move and calculate the coordinates of target position. All these results are transmitted to motion control module through USB interface. DSP-based motion control module generates a series of motion commands to drive robot’s manipulator to pick up chess piece and move it to the target position. The main research task is to design hardware circuit of ARM-based control and management modules to develop a practical circuit board. Reliability of circuit board was verified by experiment.Firstly, functional and requirement analysises on development of ARM-based control and management module had been investigated in this paper. Secondly, solution of hardware circuit had been employed based on analysis and it’s composed of two parts:core board and extended board. The32-bit ARM processor—S3C2410A (ARM920T core) is main chip employed in the core board which includes power circuit, reset circuit, system clock circuit, memory (SDRAM, NOR Flash, NAND Flash) circuit. The extended board includes JTAG interface, LCD and touch screen-driven interface circuit, USB HOST/Device interface, RS232interface, keyboard and mouse interface, Ethernet interface, HPI interface circuit module. ARM-based control and management module communicates with lower-level facility or module like DSP-based image acquisition and processing module and motion control module. It can replace common PC as controller. This paper described in detail design of modular circuits in the core board and extended board. Experiments had benn carried out to debug main module. Finally, suggestions on further improvement of ARM-based control system were given.