Design and Implementation of a ReconROS-based Obstacle Avoidance System

Autonomous mobile robots are becoming increasingly more capable and widespread. Reliable Obstacle avoidance is an integral part of autonomous navigation. This involves real time interpretation and processing of a complex environment. Strict time and energy constraints of a mobile autonomous system make efficient computation extremely desirable. The benefits of employing Hardware/Software co-designed applications are obvious and significant. Hardware accelerators are used for efficient processing of the algorithms by exploiting parallelism. FPGAs are a class of hardware accelerators, which can contain hundreds of small execution units, and can be used for Hardware/Software co-designed application. However, there is a reluctance when it comes to adoption of these devices in well established application domains, such as Robotics, due to a steep learning curve needed for FPGA application design. ReconROS has successfully bridged the gap between robotic and FPGA application development, by providing an intuitive, common development platform for robotic application development for FPGA. It does so by integrating Robotics Operating System(ROS) which is an industry and academia standard for robotics application development, with ReconOS, an operating system for re-configurable hardware. In this thesis an obstacle avoidance system is designed and implemented for an autonomous vehicle using ReconROS. The objectives of the thesis is to demonstrate and explore ReconROS integration within the ROS ecosystem and explore the design process within ReconROS framework, and to demonstrate the effectiveness of Hardware Acceleration in Robotics, by analysing the resulting architectures for Latency and Power Consumption.