A Centre-of-Mass Tracker Integrated Circuit Design in Nanometric CMOS for Robotic Visual Object Position Tracking

Object position tracking is a well-known problem in robotic vision system design. This chapter proposes a new centre-of-mass(COM) object position tracker integrated circuit design using standard low-cost digital CMOS process technology without the need for a floating gate poly2 layer. The proposed COM tracker is designed using an IBM 130-nm CMOS process with a 1V supply voltage and can be used for single-chip robotic visual feedback object tracking application. It uses an analogue sampled-data technique and is operated by a two-phase clocking system. The clock frequency can be varied to suit the real-time throughput requirements of the specific robotic object tracking tasks. A 6-input COM detector (easily extendable to 12-input or higher) was simulated and the results for various COM positions was found to be correctly tracked by the circuit. In addition, Monte Carlo simulations were carried out to prove the robustness of the technique.