Fast and robust camera-based motion tracking using FPGAsin microrobotics
Claas Diederichs · 2014
In microhandling, the optical sensor is often the only way to obtain position information about tools and specimen. In the thesis, different approaches to improving the timing performance of motion tracking in microrobotics are exploited. Firstly, a real-time operating system is used to control the scheduling of tasks. Secondly, a hardware-software co-design strategy was used: An FPGA-implementation of a tracking algorithm was utilized on an embedded system. While the real-time operating system improved all characteristics slightly, the FPGA implementation showed huge improvements especially on latency, jitter and predictability. The achievable update-rate was improved fromm 100 Hz to 1.8 GHz. The developed FPGA-solution was integrated into a microhandling station to evaluate the performance. With the integration it was possible to reduce the time of a single pick-and-place operation from 15 seconds to less than two seconds. To show the flexibility of the developed algorithm, the prototype was also applied to a traffic-sign recognition system.