Spinoza Hardware

Spinoza's hardware is housed in a 6U VME card cage. It contains a network of three INMOS transputers and two Texas Instruments TMS320C40 DSPs. The workstation host, a Sun Sparc-20, is connected to the robot through a parallel port transputer link adaptor, to be upgrated to a 1.6 MBit/s spread spectrum radio link.

The two C40 nodes are dedicated to processing images from the two black and white stereo cameras and the color RGB camera mounted on the pan-tilt unit. The C40 VIPTIM module has an on-board A110 engine that performs 5 by 7 real-time kernel convolution. Both of these modules are available from Traquair Data Systems.

The network communicates with the RWI base controller and pan-tilt controllers through a dual serial tram.

This page is maintained by:

Vladimir Tucakov (tucakov@cs.ubc.ca)