IEEE Access (Jan 2020)

Feasibility Study and Porting of the Damped Least Square Algorithm on FPGA

  • Carlo Sau,
  • Tiziana Fanni,
  • Claudio Rubattu,
  • Luca Fanni,
  • Luigi Raffo,
  • Francesca Palumbo

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3025367
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8
pp. 175483 – 175500

Abstract

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Modern embedded computing platforms used within Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are nowadays leveraging more and more often on heterogeneous computing substrates, such as newest Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. Compared to general purpose platforms, which have a fixed datapath, FPGAs provide designers the possibility of customizing part of the computing infrastructure, to better shape the execution on the application needs/features, and offer high efficiency in terms of timing and power performance, while naturally featuring parallelism. In the context of FPGA-based CPSs, this article has a two fold mission. On the one hand, it presents an analysis of the Damped Least Square (DLS) algorithm for a perspective hardware implementation. On the other hand, it describes the implementation of a robotic arm controller based on the DLS to numerically solve Inverse Kinematics problems over a heterogeneous FPGA. Assessments involve a Trossen Robotics WidowX robotic arm controlled by a Digilent ZedBoard provided with a Xilinx Zynq FPGA that computes the Inverse Kinematic.

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