Controlling a six-legged robot through an FPGA and a high-level application

The video shows a six-legged robot being controlled from a high-level application written in C#. The low-level motor control is done by a single-chip FPGA system, which holds the drivers for the 18 servo motors, and uTosNet, which is the communication protocol for communicating with the PC. Communication is done over a serial port (through a USB-COM converter chip).
It should be noted that not all of the servos are working currently, due to a few invalid pins, and old hardware;)

The hardware used is:
- Six-legged robot, with 18 RC-servos
- Xilinx Spartan3AN50 FPGA
- PC with Windows 7

The video is made to accompany the paper "A step toward 'plug and play' robotics with SoC technology" by Anders Stengaard Sørensen, Simon Falsig and Rolf Ugilt, University of Southern Denmark, which will be presented at the CLAWAR 2010 conference in Nagoya, Japan 31 August - 3 September 2010.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• robot
• six-legged
• fpga
• tosnet
• utosnet
• xilinx
• university of southern denmark
• sdu
• syddansk universitet
• robolab
• walker