Hardware-efficient path planning for a mobile robot and FPGA realization

We consider the problem of finding a feasible path for a mobile robot from one point to another that avoids collisions with objects (obstacles) in the environment. We assume that the robot is equipped only with a field programmable gate array device (for processing) and present an algorithm for this problem. We also present an area-efficient architecture. One element of the architecture is the Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer (CORDIC) to facilitate rotation of the robot. Some experiments are also presented. © 2012 IEEE.