Author(s):
Subhashis Roy, Joyashree Bag, Subir Kumar Sarkar

Author Affiliation:
Department of Electronics &Telecommunication Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata-700032, India

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Efficient navigation in mobile robotics generally needs solving two important problems pertaining to the knowledge of the position of the robot and a motion control strategy. The problem becomes even more critical when no prior knowledge of the environment and surroundings is available where it is moving or in operation. These three independent tasks need to be solved in conjunction with the mobile robot navigation. Hence, a processor for the mobile robot navigation system has been proposed, designed, and implemented in the present work using Xilinx ISE14.3 simulation tools and Kintex7 FPGA board. Kintex™-7 FPGA board provides a wide-ranging, high-performance development with demonstration platform. The processor is efficient in avoiding collisions with mobile robots as well as with physical objects using RFID technology and a suitable algorithm. The use of RFID is justified because of RFID’s computational simplicity compared to many of its counterparts in the state of the art. In order to improve the throughput and flexibility in the present processor implementation, CORDIC algorithm has been employed because of the simplicity of the operations incorporated in it, which make it very well suitable for VLSI implementation. Cadence design analyzer using 0.18μm CMOS technology shows that the throughput of this architecture is very high with a core area of 0.102 mm^2 only.

KEYWORDS:
Navigation processor; RFID technology; CORDIC algorithm; VHDL, FPGA.