VelKoz: Generating Accelerators for Rigid-Flexible Robots through Domain Specific High-level Synthesis

Rigid-flexible robots, integrating soft materials with rigid structures, have garnered increasing research interest due to their enhanced capabilities, flexibility, and inherent safety. However, existing control algorithms for these robots often exhibit high computational complexity, hindering real-time implementation. This work proposes VelKoz, an accelerator generation framework tailored for rigid-flexible robot control. It enables users to program in MATLAB and generate synthesizable Verilog code for control algorithms. A key challenge addressed is the integration of robotics domain knowledge with the dataflow representations commonly used in hardware accelerator design. Experimental results demonstrate that the generated accelerators achieve orders-of-magnitude lower latency and energy consumption compared to general-purpose CPUs and outperform customized high-level synthesis (HLS) implementations by 5.3 ×.