FPGA-based vision perception architecture for robotic missions

Most of the robot behaviors are based on visual sensing and perception. This paper describes a smart camera composed of a full-hardware vision architecture coupled with an embedded camera sensor. The hardware architecture corresponds to low-level visual perception processes. The integration of such a system onto the robot enables not only to accelerate the visual processing till real-time behavior but also to compress the data-flow at the output of the camera. The results obtained during indoor robotic missions show an important reduction factor of data communication.