Reconfigurable Computing: Architectures and Applications

Abstract

This paper presents an embedded multi-camera system for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for mobile robots. The multi-camera system has been designed and implemented as a SoC (System-on-a-Chip), using reconfigurable computing technology. In this system the images are captured in real-time by means of four CMOS digital cameras. After some pre-processing steps, those images are sent to an embedded softcore processor by a direct memory access (DMA) channel. In this system, images are captured, pre-processed and sent to the embedded processor at 30 frames per second in color mode and 60 frames per second in gray-scale mode. This paper also shows the main advantages of using multi-cameras to implement SLAM based on the Extended Kalman Filter.