A restructurable VLSI robotics vector processor architecture for real-time control

The authors propose a restructurable architecture based on a VLSI robotics vector processor (RVP) chip. It is specially tailored to exploit parallelism in the low-level matrix/vector operations characteristic of the kinematics and dynamics computations required for real-time control. The RVP is comp...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on robotics and automation 1989-10, Vol.5 (5), p.583-599
Main Authors: Sadayappan, P., Ling, Y.-L.C., Olson, K.W., Orin, D.E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied sciences
CMOS technology
Computer architecture
Computer networks
Computer science
control theory
systems
Concurrent computing
Control theory. Systems
Exact sciences and technology
Kinematics
Parallel processing
Robotics
Robots
Vector processors
Very large scale integration
VLIW
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Summary:The authors propose a restructurable architecture based on a VLSI robotics vector processor (RVP) chip. It is specially tailored to exploit parallelism in the low-level matrix/vector operations characteristic of the kinematics and dynamics computations required for real-time control. The RVP is composed of three tightly synchronized 32-bit floating-point processors to provide adequate computational power. Besides adder and multiplier units in each processor, the RVP contains a triple register-file, dual shift network, and dual high-speed input/output (I/O) channels to satisfy the storage and data movement demands of the computations targeted. Efficiently synchronized multiple-RVP configurations, which may be viewed as variable very-long-instruction-word architectures, can be constructed and adapted to match the computational requirements of specific robotics computations. The use of the RVP is illustrated through a detailed example of the Jacobian computation, demonstrating good speedup over conventional microprocessors even with a single RVP. The RVP has been developed to be implementable on a single VLSI chip using 1.2- mu m CMOS technology, so that a single-board multiple-RVP system can be targeted for use on a mobile robot.< >
ISSN:1042-296X
2374-958X
DOI:10.1109/70.88078