FPGA-realization of the kinematics IP for SCARA robot

In the implementation of robot motion control, it often requires complex forward and inverse kinematics calculation. However, this algorithm requires more CPU time in the software realization and apparently affects the response of robot movement. To solve this problem, the work is aimed at the development of the forward and inverse kinematics IP (intellectual property) based on FPGA (field programmable gate array) implementation and hoped to complete the overall computation less than ten microseconds for the purpose of enhancing the performance of the robot movement. In this paper, firstly, the forward and inverse kinematics for SCARA robot is derived. Secondly the circuit behavior using VHDL (Very-High-Speed-IC Hardware Description Language) is described. The design of VHDL code will apply the parameterized function to increase the code flexible and the FSM (Finite state machine) strategy is used to reduce the hardware resource usage. To verify the correctness of the proposed forward and inverse kinematics IP, a co-simulation work is constructed by ModelSim and Simulink. The forward and inverse kinematics IP is run by ModelSim and the Simulink models is taken as a test bench that generates stimulus to ModelSim and displays the output response. Finally, the developed forward and inverse kinematics IP will be downloaded to FPGA to further confirm its effectiveness.