The realization of a SoPC-based electric unicycle

This paper realizes a SoPC system which balances an electric unicycle based on image data from a CMOS camera. Generally, tilt-meters and gyros have commonly been chosen to measure the tilt angle and angle rate of a unicycle. In this paper, a CMOS camera is employed as the tilt angle measurement sensor instead. Through simple image processing techniques, a hardware circuit module for inclination measurement for the unicycle is implemented on the FPGA of a SoPC. By the concept of software hardware co-design, the inclination measurement module is integrated with the double-PD control method on the SoPC to balance the unicycle. Simulation and experimental results confirm that the resulting system meets the design goal.