| FROM
THE EDITOR
This week we made a trip to the Robot Fighting
League National Championships in San Francisco to watch a very
unusual and demanding application of programmable logic. One
of the robots competing in the battles is based around an FPGA
development board with a low-cost FPGA sporting a 32-bit embedded
processor core, embedded software, IP peripherals, custom high-performance
DSP algorithms, WiFi control, and – we should probably mention – half
inch thick plate titanium armor.
Thanks to today’s low-cost FPGAs and highly-capable design
tools, complex system-on-chip design is now accessible to a wide
variety of design teams and projects. CycloneBot is just one example
of the vast variety of new and unexpected systems where we’ll
see powerful programmable logic devices showing up in the coming
years.
Thanks
for reading! If
there's anything we can do to make our publications more useful
to you, please let us know at: comments@fpgajournal.com
Kevin Morris – Editor
FPGA and Programmable Logic Journal
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Metal Mangling Mayhem
Does CycloneBot Dream of Electric Sheep?
Two hulking masses of mechanized
metal sit separated by 40 feet in a bulletproof Lexan cage lined by
twelve-inch iron girders. The green light flashes and the starting
buzzer sounds. Industrial electric motors on both fighting robots spin
their outer armored shells to rotational speeds near 1,000 RPM. The
two ‘bots rush toward each other, colliding
in a spectacular spray of molten metal. Broken bolts ricochet off the
protective barrier.
The crowd at the 2004 Robot Fighting League (RFL)
National Championships in San Francisco flinches at the thunderous
impact, then leaps to its feet cheering. In less than ten seconds,
the match is over, one robot disabled and leaking blue smoke while
the other maneuvers and spins in victory a few feet away. Once the
arena is safe, robot wranglers with leather gloves and push brooms
enter the ring to clear the debris for the next match while excited
kids wearing protective ear plugs wave and call for souvenir scraps
of broken ‘bot.
CycloneBot and its opponent are wheeled into position
for the next match. Nuvation’s Michael Worry activates the low voltage bus, and the
Nios development board comes to life. The Cyclone FPGA downloads its
configuration bitstream, instantiating custom designed digital signal
processing (DSP) blocks and an Altera Nios processor core. The Nios connects
with memory and peripherals and begins executing the first instructions
of its embedded program. The peripherals awake and begin transmitting,
receiving, and distilling data to and from the various sensors and servos
attached to the FPGA board’s connectors. Within milliseconds, the
Cyclone FPGA is transformed into a sophisticated embedded computing and
signal processing system on a single chip. [more]
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