blue tooth configuration of an FPGA:an application to modular robotics

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Introduction

Self-reconfigurable modular robotics represents a new approach to robotic hardware.
Instead of designing a new and different mechanical robot for each task, a generic “robot” is composed of many simple, identical, interacting and possibly lowpriced modules. The versatility of the robot emerges from the connection of all its components. Furthermore, given some mechanical abilities, a modular robot can even modify the position of its components to meet the demands of different tasks or different working environments



PolyBot

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) has been pursuing research on modular robotics
for about ten years. The third generation of a robot called PolyBot (see [YDR00b]) (Figure 1.1) has been released three years ago. The system is composed of several modules containing a microcontroller, a motor, sensors and the ability to attach to other modules. The robot has demonstrated a variety of locomotion, climbing, manipulation as well as manual and self-reconfiguration.


Molecule

The Dartmouth College Robot Lab has released a modular robot called Molecule
by low-level assembly code in the onboard processor and high-level code on workstations. There is no clear documentation about this project, but it seems that the communication between the modules and the workstations is performed with cables.


M-TRAN

The Distributed System Design Research Group of Intelligent Systems Institute, AIST
has developed a novel self-reconfigurable modular robot called Modular Transformer It has successfully realized multi-mode robotic motion by
changing its shape smoothly from a crawler to a four-legged walking robot, which is a
world-leading research result


Our Contribution to the YaMoR Project

. In the first phase of the project, the power of the different boards has been largely underexploited.The FPGA contains actually a simple PWM, although it supports a complex
design including a softcore Microblaze processor and partial dynamic reconfiguration. The Bluetooth board is currently driven by the original firmware provided by the man-ufacturer of the chip. It only offers the possibility to establish a Bluetooth connection with a remote device and then act as a virtual serial port.