Remote control of an SoPC-Based self-parking car

Abstract

This report describes the design process of a remote control SoPC-based self-parking car. The remote control operations are done using an Android application running on a Smartphone and communicating with the digital controller via Bluetooth wireless technology. Distance measurements are obtained from Infrared sensors disposed on the car. The car performs three parking modes namely: parallel, perpendicular and reverse parking. The approach used to design the digital controller is the system-on-programmable-chip (SoPC) technique. This latter integrates a Nios II soft core processor, intellectual property (IP) cores and custom logic components designed in VHDL, all in the same chip. In addition to remotely controlling the system, the Android application serves as a graphical user interface (GUI), allowing the user to follow the operations of the ongoing parking mode performed by the car. The digital controller developed with Altera Quartus II 9.1 sp2 Web Edition software development suite tools is realized on a Cyclone-II EP2C35F672C6 FPGA platform to verify its feasibility and functionality. Additional hardware circuitry of the system is implemented on a Protoboard.