An FPGA-Based Mobile Robot Controller

Mobile robotics and embedded systems are two research areas that have been receiving a considerable attention in years. Combining these two research topics is a very interesting and promising task. Some of the problems of controlling robots using embedded systems are designing device drivers, provide network communication, and develop complex control algorithms under hardware limitations. Player is one of the most used controllers for mobile robots and sensors. It has been widely used by the robotics community. This paper presents an embedded implementation of Player client mobile robot using the NIOS II softcore. Our client has been experimentally tested on a FPGA board and compared to a standard PC implementation.