A versatile approach to polygonal object avoidance in indoor environments with hardware schemes using an FPGA-based multi-robot

• Main Authors: Basha, Mudasar, Kumar, Munuswamy Siva, Chinnaiah, Mangali Chinna, Lam, Siew-Kei, Srikanthan, Thambipillai, Janardhan, Narambhatla, Krishna, Dodde Hari, Dubey, Sanjay
• Other Authors: School of Computer Science and Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2024
• Subjects: Computer and Information Science; Multi-robot; Collision avoidance
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/173777
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Service robots perform versatile functions in indoor environments. This study focuses on obstacle avoidance using flock-type indoor-based multi-robots. Each robot was developed with rendezvous behavior and distributed intelligence to perform obstacle avoidance. The hardware scheme-based obstacle-avoidance algorithm was developed using a bio-inspired flock approach, which was developed with three stages. Initially, the algorithm estimates polygonal obstacles and their orientations. The second stage involves performing avoidance at different orientations of obstacles using a heuristic based Bug2 algorithm. The final stage involves performing a flock rendezvous with distributed approaches and linear movements using a behavioral control mechanism. VLSI architectures were developed for multi-robot obstacle avoidance algorithms and were coded using Verilog HDL. The novel design of this article integrates the multi-robot's obstacle approaches with behavioral control and hardware scheme-based partial reconfiguration (PR) flow. The experiments were validated using FPGA-based multi-robots.