Abstract
Modern embedded computing platforms used within Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are nowadays leveraging more and more often on heterogeneous computing substrates, such as newest Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. Compared to general purpose platforms, which have a fixed datapath, FPGAs provide designers the possibility of customizing part of the computing infrastructure, to better shape the execution on the application needs/features, and offer high efficiency in terms of timing and power performance, while naturally featuring parallelism. In the context of FPGA-based CPSs, this article has a two fold mission. On the one hand, it presents an analysis of the Damped Least Square (DLS) algorithm for a perspective hardware implementation. On the other hand, it describes the implementation of a robotic arm controller based on the DLS to numerically solve Inverse Kinematics problems over a heterogeneous FPGA. Assessments involve a Trossen Robotics WidowX robotic arm controlled by a Digilent ZedBoard provided with a Xilinx Zynq FPGA that computes the Inverse Kinematic.
Highlights
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are complex platforms, composed of physical and computing parts deeply inter-wined, characterized by a strong interaction with environment and users [1]
Modern embedded computing platforms used within Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are nowadays leveraging more and more often on heterogeneous computing substrates, such as newest Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices
In the context of FPGA-based CPSs, this article has a two fold mission. It presents an analysis of the Damped Least Square (DLS) algorithm for a perspective hardware implementation. It describes the implementation of a robotic arm controller based on the DLS to numerically solve Inverse Kinematics problems over a heterogeneous FPGA
Summary
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are complex platforms, composed of physical and computing parts deeply inter-wined, characterized by a strong interaction with environment and users [1]. Most of robotics algorithms are not easy to be parallelized, e.g. due to the dependencies between successive smaller paths calculations, and exploiting heterogeneity by shaping computing cores or by optimizing the execution on the different available ones, according to the involved operations, is not trivial. The analysis of the DLS algorithm, with the specific intent of understanding which parameters could influence a perspective hardware implementation A preliminary FPGA-based implementation of the robotic arm controller capable of executing different DLS profiles (baseline and high-performance). To the best of our knowledge, despite our implementation is just preliminary and the assessment is covering just the reconfigurable part of the FPGA-based arm controller, the present work is the first one porting DLS for IK problems solving on such heterogeneous substrate.
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