Design and construction of an autonomous Modular Robot Unit with Bluetooth and FPGA

Modular Robot Unit

Aim of this modular robot project was to construct an autonomous modular robot unit with one degree of freedom and a wireless interface. During this project I was responsible for the development of the electronics, control software, VHDL and Bluetooth Protocols described below.

Documentation

Movie of a wireless controlled module (1.7MB)

Getting Started User Guide 1.0 (1.2MB) Gives an introduction to how to use YaMoR
Bluetooth Board Reference Guide 1.0 (1.4MB) Describes Bluetooth board
FPGA Board Reference Guide 1.0 (1.4MB) Describes FPGA board
Power Board Reference Guide 1.0 (1.2MB) Describes Power board

Electronics

The robot module contains the following boards:

• Bluetooth Board
• FPGA Board
• Power Board

Bluetooth Board

Main features:

• System on Chip, combination of RF Bluetooth components and ARM core
• Embedded Bluetooth stack and own appications runing on ARM
• 8 Mbit SRAM
• Up to 32 Mbit Flash memory
• Programmable by JTAG and via RS232 with Flash loader tool

FPGA Board

Main features:

• Spartan 3 FPGA with 400.000 gates
• 4 Mbit high speed SRAM (10 ns)
• FPGA programmable with JTAG interface or via Slave Serial mode
• Use up to 6 MicroBlaze inside the FPGA (one with SRAM)

Power Board

Main features:

• Provides 3 different voltages
• Step-Down Converter for high efficiency
• Battery Charger
• Battery Protection like protection from discharging too much
• Automatic switch over from battery to external power supply when connected