Robotic Exploration and Landmark Determination: Hardware-Efficient Algorithms and FPGA Implementations

This book presents hardware-efficient algorithms and FPGA implementations for two robotic tasks, namely exploration and landmark determination. The work identifies scenarios for mobile robotics where parallel processing and selective shutdown offered by FPGAs are invaluable. The book proceeds to systematically develop memory-driven VLSI architectures for both the tasks. The architectures are ported to a low-cost FPGA with a fairly small number of system gates. A robot fabricated with this FPGA on-board serves to validate the efficacy of the approach. Numerous experiments with the robot are reported.