EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 48521, 12 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/48521
Research Article

Using Simulated Partial Dynamic Run-Time Reconfiguration to Share Embedded FPGA Compute and Power Resources across a Swarm of Unpiloted Airborne Vehicles

David Kearney and Mark Jasiunas

Reconfigurable Computing Laboratory, School of Computer and Information Science, University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes Boulevard, Mawson Lakes 5095, South Australia, Australia

Received 19 May 2006; Revised 1 November 2006; Accepted 1 November 2006

Academic Editor: Neil Bergmann

Copyright © 2007 David Kearney and Mark Jasiunas. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We show how the limited electrical power and FPGA compute resources available in a swarm of small UAVs can be shared by moving FPGA tasks from one UAV to another. A software and hardware infrastructure that supports the mobility of embedded FPGA applications on a single FPGA chip and across a group of networked FPGA chips is an integral part of the work described here. It is shown how to allocate a single FPGA's resources at run time and to share a single device through the use of application checkpointing, a memory controller, and an on-chip run-time reconfigurable network. A prototype distributed operating system is described for managing mobile applications across the swarm based on the contents of a fuzzy rule base. It can move applications between UAVs in order to equalize power use or to enable the continuous replenishment of fully fueled planes into the swarm.