An FPGA based platform for real time robot localization

The paper presents a hardware architecture for implementing a mobile robot localization approach through encoders´ measurements and absolute localization using camera tracking images. This technique has been developed and implemented for the motion of the robot from an initial position towards another desired position, taking into account the tradeoff between complexity (reducing computation time) and performance (reducing traveling time). The proposed method is implemented on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) board through mixed hardware / software implementation in order to ensure fluid robot navigation. Experimental tests on Xilinx Virtex 5 ML507 proved the effectiveness of the proposed architecture since we have obtained a reduction of 85 % in execution time compared to initial MATLAB version developed on a PC platform.