Design Issues

VLSI design for robot application is a complex task which requires a conceptual framework that control its complexity. Several decisions should be taken during the design process such as: What is the best architecture for this application, how specific the hardware implementation should be, what kind of tools needed to implement such design, and the cost of the design.

To be able to take such decisions, the computational needs for the applications should be analyzed and the performance requirements of the robot has to be considered.

For a generic robot system there are three major layers of computation proposed in [31]:

• Management layer which includes:
  • user interface
  • operating system support
  • resource allocation
  • coordination
• Reasoning layer which includes:
  • decision making
  • causal reasoning
  • temporal reasoning
  • geometric reasoning
  • planning
  • world modeling
• Device interaction layer includes:
  • adaptive control
  • kinematics and dynamics
  • multi-sensor fusion
  • interpretation
  • feature extraction
  • preprocessing

One of the most important tools the has been developed recently is the hardware description languages (DHL) which enables top-down design using high-level descriptions.