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FROM THE EDITOR
This week we made a trip to the Robot Fighting
League National Championships in San Francisco to watch a very
unusual and demanding application of programmable logic. One of the
robots competing in the battles is based around an FPGA development
board with a low-cost FPGA sporting a 32-bit embedded processor
core, embedded software, IP peripherals, custom high-performance DSP
algorithms, WiFi control, and – we should probably mention – half
inch thick plate titanium armor.
Thanks to today’s low-cost FPGAs and highly-capable
design tools, complex system-on-chip design is now accessible to a
wide variety of design teams and projects. CycloneBot is just one
example of the vast variety of new and unexpected systems where
we’ll see powerful programmable logic devices showing up in the
coming years.
Thanks for reading! If
there's anything we can do to make our publications more useful to
you, please let us know at: comments@fpgajournal.com
Kevin
Morris – Editor
FPGA and Programmable Logic
Journal |
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Metal Mangling Mayhem
Does CycloneBot
Dream of Electric Sheep?
Two hulking masses of mechanized metal sit separated by 40
feet in a bulletproof Lexan cage lined by twelve-inch iron girders. The
green light flashes and the starting buzzer sounds. Industrial electric
motors on both fighting robots spin their outer armored shells to
rotational speeds near 1,000 RPM. The two ‘bots rush toward each other,
colliding in a spectacular spray of molten metal. Broken bolts ricochet
off the protective barrier.
The crowd at the 2004 Robot Fighting League (RFL) National
Championships in San Francisco flinches at the thunderous impact, then
leaps to its feet cheering. In less than ten seconds, the match is over,
one robot disabled and leaking blue smoke while the other maneuvers and
spins in victory a few feet away. Once the arena is safe, robot wranglers
with leather gloves and push brooms enter the ring to clear the debris for
the next match while excited kids wearing protective ear plugs wave and
call for souvenir scraps of broken ‘bot.
CycloneBot and its opponent are wheeled into position for
the next match. Nuvation’s Michael Worry activates the low voltage bus,
and the Nios development board comes to life. The Cyclone FPGA downloads
its configuration bitstream, instantiating custom designed digital signal
processing (DSP) blocks and an Altera Nios processor core. The Nios
connects with memory and peripherals and begins executing the first
instructions of its embedded program. The peripherals awake and begin
transmitting, receiving, and distilling data to and from the various
sensors and servos attached to the FPGA board’s connectors. Within
milliseconds, the Cyclone FPGA is transformed into a sophisticated
embedded computing and signal processing system on a single chip. [more]
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