Fpga-based Ubiquitous Computing Intelligence for Robotic Formation Control

Ubiquitous computing (UC) has been an important stream in distributed computing, which is nowadays recognized as an attractive vision in ambient intelligence (AmI) technologies and home robotic systems. This paper, focusing on our work on the application of field programmable gate array (FPGA) in mobile robotics, presents a prototypical computing node of a ubiquitous robot (Ubibot) for indoor multiple robot coordination. The hardware based FGPA designs such as colour discrimination, object tracking, relative distance estimation, and robotic steering manoeuvre are integrated into a single chip. This hardware design, based on the system-on-programmable chip concept, will demonstrate the feasibility of an AmI environment for real-time processing with lower power consumption.