ROS on ARM Processor Embedded with FPGA for Improvement of Robotic Computing

Abstract

This paper presents the development of an embedded computing system with the implementation of communication between ROS (Robot Operating System) -on- ARM processor and FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) for improvement of robotic computing. A DE0-Nano Terasic Altera Cyclone IV development board is used in FPGA side which is programmed with Verilog code to define GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output). On the other hand, GPIO parallel communication python library is developed for RPi3 (Raspberry Pi3) board integrated with ARM Cortex-A53 processor. Implementation of parallel communication between FPGA and RPi3 is verified. As ROS is widely used for different types of robots development, we considered ROS on RPi3 for general purpose use in robotic computing system. As a case study, we performed humanoid robot fall simulation on ROS, controlled via 3-axis accelerometer embedded with DE0-Nano board.