Designing and building embedded environment for robotic control application

Embedded robotics controller is one of the most complex embedded systems. The specific hardware components required by each controller and the real time constraint lead to increase the complexity to design this kind of system. The availability of FPGA circuits and its associated hardware library combined with embedded Linux can improve the time to market, the stability and the power consumption of such controller. This paper describes the design and building of an embedded controller for robotic application based on the Xilinx XUP board using MontaVista real-time Linux and OROCOS library. We present the motivations of this work, the different phases encountered to release it, and the justification of each hardware or software choice. Finally, we discuss the strength and weaknesses of the proposed solution.