Soft core robot with joint wheel motion controller

The goal of the "soft core robot¿ project is to set the way for a robot with minimalistic component and pin count, based on custom computing. Additionally, the ¿joint wheel motion controller¿ specifically takes advantage of custom computing in order to privilege angular precision over linear velocity which is interesting for some applications including mobile robotics. The proposed ¿soft core robot¿ is expected to produce a small but very powerful and versatile robot. The chosen processing platform is based on a FPGA plus microprocessor in the same chip. The proposed example application is the fire fighting contest at Instituto Polite¿cnico da Guarda, in Portugal. The joint wheel controller is not yet fully operational but results for the control of a single motor are presented. The overall status of the project is addressed, as well as the pros and cons of the approaches taken.