An Optimized Architecture for CGA Operations and Its Application to a Simulated Robotic Arm

Conformal geometric algebra (CGA) is a new geometric computation tool that is attracting growing attention in many research fields, such as computer graphics, robotics, and computer vision. Regarding the robotic applications, new approaches based on CGA have been proposed to efficiently solve proble...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inElectronics (Basel) Vol. 11; no. 21; p. 3508
Main Authors Vitabile, Salvatore, Franchini, Silvia, Vassallo, Giorgio
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.11.2022
Subjects
Algebra
Algorithms
Computer graphics
Computer vision
Coprocessors
Design
Design and construction
Geometry
Grasping (robotics)
Inverse kinematics
Kinematics
Machine vision
Microprocessors
Rigid-body dynamics
Robot arms
Robotics
Robots
Software packages
Space exploration
System on chip
Translations
Italy
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Summary:Conformal geometric algebra (CGA) is a new geometric computation tool that is attracting growing attention in many research fields, such as computer graphics, robotics, and computer vision. Regarding the robotic applications, new approaches based on CGA have been proposed to efficiently solve problems as the inverse kinematics and grasping of a robotic arm. The hardware acceleration of CGA operations is required to meet real-time performance requirements in embedded robotic platforms. In this paper, we present a novel embedded coprocessor for accelerating CGA operations in robotic tasks. Two robotic algorithms, namely, inverse kinematics and grasping of a human-arm-like kinematics chain, are used to prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The coprocessor natively supports the entire set of CGA operations including both basic operations (products, sums/differences, and unary operations) and complex operations as rigid body motion operations (reflections, rotations, translations, and dilations). The coprocessor prototype is implemented on the Xilinx ML510 development platform as a complete system-on-chip (SoC), integrating both a PowerPC processing core and a CGA coprocessing core on the same Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA chip. Experimental results show speedups of 78× and 246× for inverse kinematics and grasping algorithms, respectively, with respect to the execution on the PowerPC processor.
ISSN:2079-9292
2079-9292
DOI:10.3390/electronics11213508