Design And Implementation Of Swarm Robotic Controlling System

Controlling system is the nerve center of the swarm robotic system, which directly determines the completion of specified tasks according to the requirements. Therefore it becomes a popular research field of swarm robotic orientation. Current robotic processing units usually use the general-purpose processor chips, which are produced by large vendors, standard-unified, mature and stable. However, under some certain robotic application scenarios, there are two main inevitable drawbacks: 1. structural redundancy, which is contrary to the individual requirements of low intelligence for swarm robotics; 2. when the number of individuals grows exponentially, the cost becomes extremely high.This paper designs and implements a simple and efficient autonomous controlling system of swarm robotic system which is named SiPU. SiPU implements a micro-controller system with hardware description language. SiPU uses a bus structure with CPU core as the master device and the peripheral modules as the slave devices. All the slave devices connect with the master device using the bus. Then we implement all the above logical design at FPGA board and complete the hardware connection between the FPGA board and the functional board of swarm robot.The main work of this paper includes:⑴Describes the overall architecture of the system. SiPU system uses a PicoBlaze soft-core as its processor core, Pbus as the system bus. PWM module, general-purpose I/O module and the traying feedback module form of the motion control module, A/D converter module constitutes the peripheral communication module.⑵The motion control module is divided into three modules: PWM module, general-purpose I/O module and the traying feedback module. General-purpose I/O module dominates the robot motional state; PWM module controls the robot's speed with the control of PWM signal duty cycle; traying feedback module is used for direction control, turn control and distance control.⑶Peripheral communication module implements the A/D conversion, achieving the control of the robotic to avoid obstacles. In this research, the A/D converter chip ADC0832 is used and its connection with the FPGA circuitry is given. Inside the module the state machine approach is introduced to achieve three functions: providing the external chip ADC0832 clock signal; output channel selection signal; acquisition of the ADC0832's output data.⑷Implement the systematic logical design at the FPGA board and complete the hardware connection between the FPGA board and the functional board of swarm robot. Finally, with the SiPU system, the swarm robotic completes some tasks such as moving in a specific pattern and "freedom walking".The experiment results show that the system developed for robotic controlling meets the community needs, and is extremely simple and efficient.