A dynamic self-reconfigurable mobile robot navigation system

A mobile robot navigation system must adapt to the highly dynamic environments and emergencies under the real-time constraints. Sometimes some sensors may not work well with new environments while others may need to swap in at runtime to continue the navigation. This paper presents an agent-based embedded system platform which can dynamically reconfigure the robot system on the fly by integrating FPGA hardware and high-performance microprocessors system. Several dynamic reconfiguration models are described to improve the system efficiency with low reconfiguration latency. The reconfiguration architecture specifically for vision system is also presented. This platform can be easily extended to other robot systems, such as server robots, space robots, and multi-robot systems