The real acid test for a product comes– at the latest– when you use it yourself in a project.This is exactly what happened with the engineering company imt when it developed a trade fair demo in just four weeks. The idea of a self-balancing robot came to fruition quite quickly, with tried-and-tested procedures and the latest technologies and tools being used in the development of the idea.

A Mars AX3 FPGA module from FPGA specialists Enclustra serves as the basis for the robot. This module significantly reduced the amount of needed hardware development work, as only a very simple base board had to be developed with the power electronics and sensor systems. The detailed documentation, the VHDL reference design, the 3D CAD model and the PCB footprint – that are freely available for all Enclustra modules – helped to ensure that the PCB worked right away.

It took very little time to choose the system partition and the programming tool: With the DATAFLOW Studio , that is developed by imt, the implementation of the system was a breeze. The DATAFLOW Studio contains a RISC-V soft processor which takes care of control and regulation of the entire robot. All sensors and actuators were able to be quickly and simply connected to this high-performance open source processor via the FPGA logic.

The project was only able to be successfully carried out and the robot got up and running in such a short period of time by combining these technologies – and of course thanks to the extensive knowledge of the imt engineers.