FPGA-based Wireless Robotics Controller for Evolutionary Design Conor Doyle Supervisor: Dr. Fearghal Morgan

Introduction The focus of this project is to develop a wireless interface between a 68HC11 (Handy board) microcontroller and a Virtex II pro FPGA containing a powerpc processor. The objective of this project is to create a fully autonomous robot that is controlled by an evolved controller contained on the Virtex II FPGA.

Steps in project

The Handy Board The handy board is used to interface with the sensors and motors of the robot The core of the handy board is a motorola 68HC11 micro processor. The analog outputs of the sensors are converted to a 8 bit digital word by the micro-processor. This 8-bit value is then sent to the FPGA via the wireless link.

The Handy Board

Wireless Link The wireless link is implemented using a radiometrix RPC (Radio Packet control). The RPC module provides all the RF circuits required to inter-connect an number of micro- controllers in a radio network.

Radiometrix RPC A data packet of 1 to 27 bytes downloaded by a Host micro-controller into the RPC's packet buffer is transmitted by the RPC's transceiver and will "appear" in the receive buffer of all the RPC's within radio range. A data packet received by the RPC's transceiver is decoded, stored in a packet buffer and the Host micro-controller signalled that a valid packet is waiting to be uploaded.

Pin Functions The Radiometrix RPC has 8 pins, 4 data lines and 4 control lines: D0 – D3: 4 bi-directional data lines TXR: TX request. Data transfer request from HOST to FRPC2 TXA: TX Accept. Data accept handshake back to HOST RXR: RX Request. Data transfer request from FRPC2 to HOST RXA: RX Accept. Data accept handshake back to FRPC2