Component-Based FPGA Circuit Design and Verification for Robotic Systems Using JavaRock and ORB Engine - A Case Study

Abstract

In order to improve flexibility and productivity of designing complex robot systems which consists of a number of sensors, actuators and processors for control, component-based design methodology is a key issue. Meanwhile, an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is a potential candidate for controlling real-time system like a robot, because it can achieve shorter response time and higher performance-power efficiency by its parallel processing of hardwired digital circuits. However, it is difficult to introduce an FPGA for robot systems because designing an FPGA requires implementation of the user application into a circuit using HDL (Hardware Description Language). In this paper, design and verification flow using a Java-to-HDL synthesizer (JavaRock) and a distributed object environment (ORB Engine) is proposed. A case study of designing an inverted pendulum robot system is described, which achieves below 10 us processing time for controlling the inverted pendulum system successfully within a small FPGA chip in battery operation.