Dynamically reconfigurable FPGA for robotics control

This paper describes the programming of a reconfigurable environment to handle inverse dynamics computation for robotics control. Instruction parallelism/pipelining and avoidance of carry propagation while evaluating a lengthy sequence of sum of products is proposed. The difficulties of programming a reconfigurable platform are overcome by defining a fixed Processing Element (PE) model with multiple processing components and using microinstructions to drive the PEs. The resulting hardware could be static but could be reconfigured on the fly to provide fault tolerance characteristics. Major considerations while mapping various elements of the design to the FPGA includes the size of the area to be mapped and communication issues related to their communication. Area size selection is compared to the page size selection in operating system design. Communication issues between modules are compared to the software engineering paradigms dealing with module coupling, fan-in, fan-out and cohesiveness. Finally, the overhead associated with the downloading of the reconfiguration files is discussed.