Diseño e Implementación de un Robot Velocista de Competencia sobre Plataforma FPGA

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a Line Follower Robot for Robotrace Contests; it describes the electronics, mechanics and software design. This robot can reach top speed of 2.23 m/s in the competition circuit, which is a closed path that includes straight lines and curves with a minimum radius of 10 cm. The computer that controls the robot was designed on the Altera Cyclone IV FPGA (EP4CE22F17C6N); we used the DE0-nano Development board. The robot uses the Altera's soft-core processor NIOS II with specific cores for robot control. The control algorithm proposed is a cascade control system. Two secondary loops controls the speed of each motor and a primary loop set each reference variable according with the desired direction and velocity for the robot. Also the system has filter blocks to improve the sensors readings; the algorithm used was the Kalman Filter.