A parallel vision subsystem for robotic inspection and manipulation

The paper describes an SIMD massively parallel computer conceived for robot vision, and presents an application where the system is installed on a mobile robot to support inspection and manipulation tasks. The system consists of a scalable array of up to 4 K single-bit processors controlled by a general-purpose microcomputer through a dedicated interface. The system´s architecture is overviewed, addressing the available prototype as well as the functional units currently under design. The authors provide examples of image analysis goals that can be efficiently reached using spatially-organized parallel architectures such as SIMD arrays and give measurements of present performances. Using code profiles the authors also evaluate the speedup associated with the configuration being designed