2018 Third Scientific Conference of Electrical Engineering (SCEE), University of Technology - Iraq
FPGA Cyclone II based the Mobile Robot Control
System
Reem Ibrahim Mohammed Saad Mutashar Abbas
Department of Electrical Engineering Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Technology - Iraq University of Technology - Iraq
Baghdad, Iraq
gardnie91@yahoo.com 30099@uotechnology.edu.iq
Abstract— Mobile robots are expected to be used in harsh and
non-organized environments. Such as the applications that robots
need to Collection of information from complex conditions for
their functioning which have become very common, especially in
places that are hard to reach by humans. The wireless capability,
avoid obstacles and speed/position controllers have taken great
interest in the design of mobile robots because of the extensive
use in industrial and service fields. Therefore, the realization of
efficient and robust robot system still a challenging task. This
paper presents a mobile robot with an Artificial Neural Network
(ANN) controller implemented on Altera FPGA mini-board with
wireless capability to move to a specific distance by avoiding the
obstacle. This system uses Nios II/e soft-core processor
instantiated in ANN control of the motors based on the data
provided by the sensors. The design shows flexibility in hardware
and software, where the design can be modified easily by
inserting more complex function due to the capacity of FPGA in
contrast to existing microcontroller or microprocessor -based
designs. In comparison with previous research, the application of
robots based on the existing design is the presence of
microcontroller such as Arduino with FPGA. In the research, the
only FPGA offering the possibility of adding more complex
functions to the ability of the robot is used.
Keywords- Mobile Robot, Intelligent Controller, ANN, FPGA,
Sensors
I. INTRODUCTION
There are many justifications for using robots, but most
importantly is to protect people from working in hazardous
places and dealing with dangerous substances such as
explosive chemicals and radioactive material. Mobile robots
need speed/position controller that needs to be efficient and
robust. Therefore, it has taken a lot of efforts by researchers to
realize this goal. The best choice is the intelligent control that
combines artificial intelligence techniques with the control
engineering to design an automatic system which can also be
sensed, planned, learned and behaved in a smart way [1, 2, 3,
4]. The control system of a mobile robot is similar to any
control system which consists of basic parts the plant,
controller and the implementation platform of this controller.
Obstacles avoidance is a key and a decisive factor of
autonomous control that gives the robot the ability to reach the
destination without any collision. The movement of the robot is
restricted if not impossible without the avoidance of obstacle
facility [5]. There are several choices available for controller
hardware implementation as a result of the continuous
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Abbas H. Issa
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Technology - Iraq
Baghdad, Iraq Baghdad, Iraq
30050@uotechnology.edu.iq
evolution of technologies. Mainly there are three
methodologies available, ASICs which refers to Application
Specific Integrated Circuits, general-purpose microprocessors
and microcontrollers and finally Field Programmable Gate
Array (FPGA). The first choice is very efficient and provides
very high performance, but still costly and less flexible option
[5]. On the other hand, a microprocessor lacks the essential
circuitry on one chip causes the need for additional devices,
components and signals such as Input /Output buffer control
signals and memory. In contrast, microcontrollers overcome
these limitations by including the additional devices and
signals on the chip. However, it still has deficiency in terms of
time-limitation, permanent circuitry and the specific instruction
set that the programmer should follow to write programs.
FPGA seems very promising that overcome most of these
problems appropriately by containing millions of logical gates
that can be configured to perform any specific function.
This paper presents a low cost, accurate, and wireless based
autonomous mobile robot. The implementation uses the ANN
controller and System On Programmable Chip (SOPC)
methodology with obstacle avoidance ultrasonic sensors
implemented on Altera mini FPGA board.
II. RELATED WORKS
Significant efforts have been made by researchers to find
the best methodologies to control the speed and position of
mobile robots, starting with PID controllers to executing smart
controllers with high efficiency. This part highlights some
author’s efforts in the field of the automotive mobile robot.
In 2012, researchers proposed the neural network controller
for autonomous mobile robot [7]. The robot moved in an
overcrowded environment by detecting and bypassing the
obstacles. Infra-red (IR) sensors for back, left and right sides
are used while ultrasonic sensor is mounted in front. The
actuator system represented by two DC motors and one stepper
motor. Although, the superior performance to learn I/O non-
linear relationship presented by NN, the response still suffers
from the high settling time and overshoot. A very close work to
propose NN controller for a mobile robot is introduced. The
system uses a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) trained by
MATLAB with three ultrasonic sensors functioning to provide
information to the NN controller [8]. The authors claimed that
neural networks are excellent tools for obstacle avoidance
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 2018 Third Scientific Conference of Electrical Engineering (SCEE), University of Technology - Iraq
mobile robots due to the ability of NN to work with imprecise
information.
An inverse NN velocity controller for two-wheel mobile
robots is presented in 2017 [9]. The NN is trained to function
inverse dynamics of motors. The simulation environment is
used to compare the proposed inverse NN controller with PI
controllers. The results showed that superior performance is Fig. 1.
achieved using an inverse neural controller. Block diagram of the proposed mobile differential robot.

A stable following control rule for Rhombus-type Lunar

Exploration Wheeled Mobile Robot (RLEWMR) is presented
[10]. The Wavelet Transform and Probabilistic Neural
Network (WTPNN) is adopted for the control system
combined with the capability for accurate approximation in
order to model RLEWMR’s unknown dynamics. To learn the
parameters of WTPNN, adaptive learning algorithms are
proposed for weight and robust compensator online. The
efficiency and effectiveness of the controller are explored by
simulation and experiment. The results show the successful
application of the control system on mobile robots to track
different reference trajectories with robust control
performance.
Recently in 2018, the dynamic formulation of wheeled
mobile robots is targeted [11]. The system proposes a 3-stage
controller for stable tracking namely positioning error, PID and
inverse dynamics. The system presented good pursuit,
capacities notwithstanding when self-assertive blunders are
presented in figured torque. Additionally, a fluffy approach for
versatile robot control is considered by scientists also.
To increase the mobile robot performance, a given Fuzzy
framework frontal camera is proposed [12]. The proposed
framework comprises of three phases, the principal
incorporates getting data from the frontal camera and process
the picture to discover the way, the introduction for various
areas are evaluated in the second stage; lastly, the guiding
heading of the versatile robot is controlled by the fluffy
framework. Although, the good results produced in this work,
using a camera in a mobile robot requires huge processing
capability and high power consumption.
Although a lot of achievements have been done in mobile
robots, the research gab still opens as a hot topic especially the
limitation of hardware implementation with reconfigurability
feature.
III. METHODOLOGY
The entities of the proposed mobile system are depicted in
Fig. 1. The interface of the system consists of a PC with
Bluetooth capability and a differential robot equipped with
FPGA Altera board, a motor driving circuit, two DC Motors,
Bluetooth model, buffer interfacing circuit and sensing circuits.
The design details of the system hardware are described in
this part. The main purpose is to describe how the H-bridge is
used to control the motors besides the work of sensing units
and the connection with FPGA. The whole system divided into
two subsystems as depicted in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. Overall system’s block diagram.
A. OFF-chip hardware subsystem
This part comprises the external devices which include data
transmit/receive unit; the sensors, the motor driving unit and an
interface block (buffers).
In order to wirelessly communicate with the robot, the HC-
05 Bluetooth model is used for this purpose. This model is a
non-expensive and compatible with many devices such as
laptops, mobile phones, and others. The addition of Bluetooth
to robot gives it greater ability to interact with the user and
communication. Using Bluetooth capability, the user can send
the set point from a PC which is used by the robot to move to a
specific distance. To distinguish and maintain a strategic
distance from the obstacles in the track of the robot, ultrasonic
sensor HC-SR04 is used for this purpose. The sensor contains
two openings one is used to send ultrasonic bursts while the
second one receives echo signal. The sensor interfaced with
FPGA utilizing two sticks, in particular, Trig and Echo.
Likewise, the robot utilizes three ultrasonic sensors to
recognize impediments on the front, left and right sides. To
make the robot moves to a specific distance, speed encoded is
required. This device converts the mechanical motion to an
electrical signal that can be used for distance, speed and/or
position control. Applications that employ encoders to control
specific parameters are closed-loop feedback or closed-loop
control systems. In this work, two HC-020K double speed
measuring module incremental encoders to measure the
angular displacement for wheels are used.
For the robot to move in all directions and at a different
speed, it requires a driving circuit to function properly. L298N
H-bridge circuit and Pulse Width Modulation (PWM)
generated by FPGA are used to control the two DC motors.
This gadget contains two parallel H-bridges to control every
DC engine with three pins for each engine where two pins are

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 2018 Third Scientific Conference of Electrical Engineering (SCEE), University of Technology - Iraq
utilized for bearing control while the third one provided by
PWM to control the speed. The speed of engines is balanced by
controlling the obligation cycle of PWM flag. For example, the
turn of the engine is equivalent to supply voltage if there
should be an occurrence of 100% obligation cycle and is like
half voltage of the power supply if half obligation cycle is
connected. Finally, the operating voltage of all off-chip
circuitry is 5 V and most FPGAs are working with 3.3 voltage
level as well as the EP2C5T144C8 board from Altera used in
this research. Therefore, to make the signals exchanged
between off chip devices and FPGA in a compatible way with
protection for FPGA itself, SN74LS244 supports are
incorporated as an interface amongst them and the FPGA.
B. ON-Chip Hardware Subsystem
This part constitutes the system’s brain which consists of
SoPC that comprises Nios II/e soft processor, memory and I/O
ports. Moreover, some non-SoPC models are created utilizing
VHDL to perform particular capacity.
1. The SoPC System
The Nios- II 32-bit embedded soft-core processor is the
essence of SoPC subsystem, it includes the following items:
 NIOS II Processor: the standard of the order is the
NIOS II Soft-Core Processor down a clock of 50MHz.
 On-Chip memory: a memory of 16Kbytes is applied
to stock the program.
 UART: to connect the Bluetooth model in order to
send and receive data.
 I/O Peripherals: to control the equipment section, a
few info/yield peripherals are required. The
peripherals are portrayed as following:
 ultrasonic_f: is a 1-bit input flag that alludes to
the front ultrasonic sensor; it goes high when
obstacle detected.
 ultrasonic_r: is a 1-bit input flag that alludes to
the right ultrasonic sensor; it goes high when
obstacle detected.
 ultrasonic_l: is a 1-bit input flag that alludes to
the left ultrasonic sensor; it goes high when
obstacle detected.
 right_encoder: is a 15-bit input flag that gets the
digital signal of the right speed encoder counter.
 left_encoder: is a 15-bit input flag that gets the
digital signal of the left speed encoder counter.
 In1_motorA and in2_motorA: each is a 1-bit
product, the signal associated with the H-
embankment chip to control the course of motor
A.
 In3_motorB and in4_motorB: each is a 1-bit
product, the signal associated with the H-
embankment chip to control the course of motor
B.
 motorAen and motorBen: is a 32-bit yield flag
that is utilized change the speed of the two dc
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engines relying upon the prerequisites of the
system.
2. Non- SoPC System
Non-SoPC units are needed in addition to the SoPC system
these units are the PWM generator for DC engines, encoder
meter, and an ultrasonic unit.
 PWM Generator: The speed of the DC motors
controlled by applying a PWM signal to the enable pin of
the H-bridge. The model of PWM contains 5 bit binary
counter connected to 32-to-1 multiplexer’s select lines By
changing the number of progressive ones connected to the
information inputs, the obligation cycle of PWM will be
changed in like manner. Therefore, the higher the duty
cycle will be achieved with the more successive ones
applied.
 Encoder counter: To measure the speed and the distance
the car to travel on, this 16 bit counter is used to count the
number of pulses generated by the speed encoder. Each
wheel has its own counter.
 Ultrasonic model: This model responsible for sending
and receiving signals from ultrasonic sensor. The model
generates an output signal with high logic if the distance
from obstacle less than 15 cm and low logic otherwise.
IV. IMPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS
The first step is made to analyses the DC motors
performance using Matlab simulation. The results are achieved
after calculating the physical parameters of the DC motor used
in this paper are given in Table I. By substituting these values
in equation (1) and (2) [13]. The transfer function of from the
input Voltage V(s) to output angle ϴ(s) and the transfer
function of from the input voltage V(s) to output speed (s)
will be as shown below:
  (s) / v(s)   / s[( Ls  R)( Js  b)]   2  
 w(s) / v(s)   / [( Ls  R)( Js  b)]   2  
TABLE I. PARAMETERS VALUE OF DC MOTORS
Physical parameter symbol value
Electric resistance R 5.61 Ω
Electric inductance L 2.29
Motor to que constant K 0.16 /
Damping of the mechanical system b 5.0526
−3
Moments of inertia of the rotor J 0.4366 . 2
   s  / v  s   0.01/ s  0.5s  1  0.01s  0.1  0.0001 
 w  s  / v  s   0.01/ 0.5s  1  0.01s  0.1  0.0001]  
The control system simulated in MATLAB program, a
response for both speed and position is obtained with two types
of controllers which are PID and NN controller. For the
designed PID controller, tuning PID Parameters by MATLAB
 2018 Third Scientific Conference of Electrical Engineering (SCEE), University of Technology - Iraq
will obtain the values of KP, Ki, and Kd as (13.737, 40.35 and - (0.432996, 0.03101 and -2.1729 respectively) (0.01755, 4.8971
0.6743 respectively) (34.45, 1.234 and 12.836 respectively) for and 0.04363 respectively) for speed and position control
speed and position control respectively. This type of controller respectively. And NN controller constructed of eight neuron
has overshoot as shown in simulation result for both speed and in the first hidden layer, one neurons in the second hidden
position control in Figs. (3, 4) respectively. layer

Fig. 3. The system response and error for PID speed controller.

Fig. 6. Internal structure of the NN model.

Fig. 4. The system response and error for PID position controller.

After that, NN controller is designed, the training NN

controller by Levenberg-Marquardt back propagation algorithm
to perform inverse function of the plants Levenberg-Marquardt
since it provides a quick preparing of the ANN contrasted with
alternate calculations of better than average inclination that has
been seen clearly from test comes about. For better system Fig. 7. Simulink between NN and PID for speed DC motor controller.
performance the algorithm uses the error signal to modify the
weights of the connections is presented. The classical BPNN
Algorithms are widely used for solving many practical
problems; it can be converted into MAT- LAB/Simulink
model by the order (gensim) as shown with the system
simulation of DC motor speed and position in Fig. 5.

Fig. 8. Simulink between NN and PID for position DC motor controller.

The system step response comparison made for controllers

Fig. 5. The Simulink Neural network block.
The ANN model and the weights block are depicted in
Fig. 6. Each of the 8 neurons for the first hidden layer has input
multiplication summation with vector dot product-process
weight.
The system simulation with PID controller and NN
controller of DC motor speed and the position indicated in
Figs. 7 and 8 respectively, a PID was used for PID parameters
optimization automatically in a Simulink model containing a
PID controller block. The optimum response will obtain with
this controller by choosing the values of Kp, Ki, and Kd as
type which clarifies the NN preference for speed and position
control, as shown in Fig. 9 As a result of this performance,
ANN is chosen to be implemented on Altera FPGA device.
The implemented hardware NN controller on FPGA has
been done by connecting the PC with FPGA board through a
USB cable and supply the board of FPGA. The hardware
results for speed controller and position by NN controller
shows in Fig. 10.

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 2018 Third Scientific Conference of Electrical Engineering (SCEE), University of Technology - Iraq

Fig. 9. Simulation comparison results of PID and ANN controllers.

Fig. 12. The block diagram file of the final system.

Fig. 10. Hardware results for speed controller and position by NN controller. TABLE II. COMPILATION SUMMARY OF THE PROPOSED SYSTEM

Quartus II 11.1 is utilized to actualize the SoPC subsystem FAMILY CYCLONE II

which is worked around the Nios-II 32-bit inserted delicate
center processor. When every one of the peripherals is DEVICE EP2C5T144C8
determined and doled out base locations, the framework is TOTAL LOGIC ELEMENTS 2374/4608 (51%)
created. Fig. 11 demonstrates the SoPC developer with the TOTAL COMBINATIONAL FUNCTIONS 2167/4608(47%)
entire SoPC framework, DEDICATED LOGIC REGISTERS 1255/4608(27%)
TOTAL REGISTERS 1255
TOTAL PINS 19/89 (21%)
TOTAL MEMORY BITS 92160/119808 (77%)

Fig. 11. Screen shot of SoPC builder system.

For non SOPC components, VHDL coding is used to

generate encoder counter, ultrasonic and PWM generator
models on Quartus II with the frequency of 5 KHz. As
mentioned earlier, the counter is needed to count the number of
pulses from the right and left encoders.
After the generation of all models, the whole system is
generated. An image record of the NIOS II framework is made;
the non SOPC units are associated with it. The pins are
allocated to each signal. Fig. 12 demonstrates the last square
graph/schematic record (final system) in Quartus II.
The compilation and download of the whole system were
successful on Cyclone II as shown in Fig. 13. The compilation
report depicted in Table II, states that the proposed system
utilizes 51% of the total logic elements, 1255 registers, 21% of
the total pins and 77% of the total memory bits.
The overall hardware form for the mobile robot system is
shown in Fig. 13.
Fig. 13. Final product mobile robot control system
The product part of the advanced controller utilizes
distinctive firmware codes to program the Nios II subsystem.
For ANN part, the training parameters are extracted from
MATLAB and implemented as a C code to be run on the Nios
processor. As depicted in Fig. 14, the robot first looks for the
set point from PC through Bluetooth. Once the data received,
the robot stars to read data from the three ultrasonic sensors.
On the off chance that a hindrance is recognized on the way,
the auto will move to the correct heading to check it; it will
maintain a strategic distance from the obstruction on the way
from the privilege if nothing is on this side. The auto will move
to one side heading to examine it as well when a hindrance is

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 2018 Third Scientific Conference of Electrical Engineering (SCEE), University of Technology - Iraq
seen on the right; it will proceed with its way from this course
if no requirement is recognized there. At the point when the
auto maintains a strategic distance from the obstruction, it will
search for the way again utilizing the already said strategy. The
auto will stop when the set point is finished or when
impediments are distinguished on the way and its two sides.
Fig. 14. The flowchart of the program.
To send the set point from the PC, Tera Term is an open-
source software which implemented terminal emulator
program is used to emulate serial port communication. The
screen shot of the software is shown in Fig. 15 which states the
send set point and counter status.
Fig. 15. Screen shot of Tera Term. Software.
V. CONCLUSION
This paper offered a model for DC motor which is used for
moving the robot. Two types of controllers are designed such
as conventional PID and the intelligent NN controllers. The
NN Controller implemented on the FPGA board. The
simulation results explain that the ANN controller is the best
and the most suitable. The PID still suffers from unsuitable
parameters such as nonlinearity, high peak overshoot, and slow
response. Using FPGA board in mobile robot control system
gives it many advantages like fast computing to avoid obstacles
in the unknown environment during the motion because of the
FPGA ultra-fast operation that could even reach a gigahertz.
The autonomous robot successfully receives the set point from
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the PC and move accordingly. The SOPC approach is used to
design the system to achieve several benefits, it is flexible in
both hardware and software. It is designed around the Nios II/e
soft-core processor instantiated in ANN control of the motors
based on the data provided by the sensors. The designer can
use the exact components that fit his application. Moreover, the
reconfiguration and alteration of the framework should be
possible whenever by including another segment or erasing a
current one. The elasticity of FPGA provides the possibility to
add more functions for the robot such as smart arms and other
tools. Although, the robot can travel in the environment with
obstacle avoidance, using this robot in an indoor environment
especially for hazard area rises the need to keep the robot away
enough from the serious risk is very crucial which the future
direction for this research.
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