An aluminium two-wheeled robot (ALBot) for teaching

Phil Culverhouse

ALBot v1

Robot motor & wheel assembly

Atmel microcontroller

Interface PCB

Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)

Atmel controller & robot

• Programme in C– Use AVRstudio and JTAG interface– PID controller available embedded

• Robot can operate from PSU or battery

• Fast – up to 2metres per second!– Teaching version of Mirosot competition robot

footballer

ALbot sensors

• Sensors– Infra-red chat

(front facing)– Infra-red Line

detect (bottom)– VGA colour

camera

FPGA

• Altera FPGA EP2C8T144 – 200MHz programmable hardware

• Quartus development tool

• Design in logic schematic and/or VHDL(Very high speed IC Hardware Description Language)

VHDL exampleLIBRARY ieee;USE ieee.std_logic_1164.all;use IEEE.numeric_std.all; -- for integer to bit_vector conversion

ENTITY SlowCounter ISPORT (Clk : IN std_logic; ClockOUT : OUT std_logic);

END SlowCounter;

ARCHITECTURE SlowCounter_v1 OF SlowCounter ISCONSTANT maxval: natural := 100; -- signal Counter: natural range 0 to maxval; -- reduce clock to approx 500ms from 64uS (Hsync input)signal Ctemp: std_logic := '0';

beginprocess (clk) begin if (clk'event) and (clk ='1') then

Counter <= Counter +1;if Counter = 0 then Ctemp <= '0';end if;if Counter = maxval then Ctemp <= not(Ctemp);end if;

end if;end process;

Clockout <= Ctemp;end SlowCounter_v1;

Sequential process

Concurrent process runs in separateHardware section

AINT302: Machine vision & behavioural Computing: laboratory 2 problem

• Recognise golf ball by hardware

• What questions to ask?1. What camera/lens

2. What colour processing?

3. What speed of operation?

4. How?!!!