Design and Implementation of an ‘Autonomous Self-Navigating Robot’

Design Problem specification: To design and implement an autonomous Self-Navigating robot. The robot should be trained and programmed to reroute its path when colliding with the objects in its path. You will be required to partition the problem into suitable hardware and software units, verify the components, integrate these components into a complete system, verify and test. The documentation should show justification for any design decisions that you make as well as development logs for both hardware and software. Evidence of approaches used for the co-design, co-implementation, co-testing, co-integration and system integration has to be provided. This assignment will provide experience of the problems and decisions in developing co-design projects. There are many possible solutions to the design problems depending on the way in which you choose to partition each problem. HW/SW Specs: The target embedded systems platform can be either the AlteraDE0 FPGA platform or the PSOC. Both devices/boards provide the opportunity to implement low-level, interrupt driven, device drivers along with the custom hardware. Altera DE0 Board: This board has a Cyclone III FPGA fitted. This supports a ’soft-core’ processor integrated with custom hardware. Using the Nios2 softcore CPU as a base you will implement a system to control a robot arm. There is the potential to use a small embedded O/S, FreeRTOS, uCLinux, or to write your own scheduler for this solution. PSoC: PSoC is industry’s most integrated programmable SoC, combining high-precision and programmable analogue and digital peripherals with an CPU in a single chip. Also contains a 24-bit hardware DFB coprocessor, offload traditional CPU tasks to the CPLD-based Universal Digital Blocks and increase system performance with the peripheral-to-peripheral DMA controller.