CDMA Communication Chips for Highly Flexible Robot Brain

Various serial interface standards, e.g., USB, IEEE-1394, etc have been established for multimedia applications. However, they do not have sufficient feature for robot control systems, in which various sensors, imagers, actuators and processors are connected as network. The robot control network requires realtime communication so as satisfy the restriction on the sampling time. Furthermore, it has communicate various amount of data, e.g., commands to the actuators being little amount and huge image data from the imagers, etc. In addition, the network should be implemented with a few wiring lines, so that the actuators can smoothly move. We propose a communication scheme suitable for the robot control system. A key idea is CDMA serial communication [1][2]. The CDMA technique is used for data multiplexing and it realizes many virtual paths on the single wiring.

[1]  T. Matsuoka,et al.  DS-CDMA wired bus with simple interconnection topology for parallel processing system LSIs , 2000, 2000 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers (Cat. No.00CH37056).

[2]  Zhiwei Xu,et al.  A 2.7 Gb/s CDMA-interconnect transceiver chip set with multi-level signal data recovery for re-configurable VLSI systems , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2003. Digest of Technical Papers. ISSCC..