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An increasing interest in the design of mobile robots has been observed in recent years, which is mainly motivated by technological advances that may allow their application to consumer markets, in addition to industrial areas. Although sophisticated techniques have been developed, choosing the appropriate hardware-software partitioning and programming robot functions are still very complex tasks. Current approaches often involve the design and implementation of hardwired solutions, with the associated problems of a long development cycle, and little flexibility to deal with changing requirements. In this talk we present a framework called ARCHITECT-R, which aims to design and program specialized hardware for robots based on FPGAs, an approach that may minimize those problems. We also present some results obtained in the implementation of control modules for mobile robots using reconfigurable computing technology, such as vision, navigation, communication, and gestures recognition.
Short Biographies:
-Marcio Merino Fernandes is currently as lecturer in the Universidade Metodista de Piracicaba, Brazil.
Prior to that he worked for Siroyan Ltd, UK, developing compiler techniques for a
clustered VLIW architecture. He has a PhD degree in Computer Science from Edinburgh University (1999),
and also MSc and BSc degrees on the same subject, from UFSCAR and USP respct., Brazil.
His main research interests are computer architecture, compiler techniques, and reconfigurable
computing. Lead by some coleagues, he is also venturing in the area of virtual reality.
-Eduardo Marques is a senior lecturer of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, where he has been working for 18 years. He has a Doctoral degree from the same university (1993), and also MSc and BSc degrees in Computer Science. The first half of his academic career was mainly devoted to research parallel machines and dataflow computing. Then he embraced the reconfigurable computing cause, currently working with development frameworks, applications in robotics, embedded systems, and education.
