Robotics Solutions Stack

Overview From Evaluation to Deployment Reference Designs IP Development Kits

Shaping the Future of Robotics Solutions

Physical AI is moving intelligence from the cloud and data center into machines that sense, decide, and act in the real world. Robots, autonomous mobile platforms, drones, and intelligent factory equipment now combine more sensors, local inference, networking, and control than a conventional fixed-function controller was designed to manage. These systems need high-performance AI alongside predictable sensor processing, data movement, networking, and control.

The Altera^® Robotics Solutions Stack is a layered framework of hardware, software, and IP blocks that together enable a robot to sense, think, and act. It integrates components such as sensors, AI processors, communication interfaces, motor controllers, and functional safety modules to provide a complete end-to-end solution for building autonomous robots, drones, and industrial automation systems. The stack ensures that data flows efficiently from perception (sensing) to computation (thinking) to actuation (motion/control), reducing development complexity and accelerating deployment.

System Challenges

Robotics platforms are becoming sensor-rich, distributed, and increasingly autonomous. Designers must combine high-volume camera, depth, position, force, and other sensor data with perception, planning, networking, motion, and safety functions, then keep that data synchronized and that control behavior predictable while meeting power, thermal, form-factor, and lifecycle constraints. Sensor streams need aggregation, timestamping, conversion, filtering, and efficient delivery to downstream compute. Motion and safety-related functions need bounded timing even while AI workloads vary in demand. Additionally, robot variants, sensors, protocols, and safety cases all change across a long product life, favoring hardware and software a team can reuse rather than rebuild.

Why FPGAs

Parallel Pipelines

Filtering, image conditioning, sensor fusion, and data movement run side by side in hardware rather than queuing for processor time, so high-rate sensor data arrives structured and time-aligned.

Predictable Execution

Control and safety-related paths that require bounded behavior stay in dedicated hardware, separated from the scheduling variability of software running alongside them.

Adaptable Interfaces

Sensors, networks, and robot variants change over a long service life. Reconfigurable I/O absorbs new interfaces and protocols without a new silicon spin, and can consolidate functions that would otherwise need separate parts.

Why Altera

Physical-World Interface

Configurable logic connects and transforms sensor and actuator data across the interfaces a robot actually uses, from camera and depth inputs to encoders, industrial networks, and motor control, subject to the device selected and the design validated.

Reusable Foundation

Teams can begin from a working example rather than an empty project. Altera provides reference designs, IP, and development kits that cover ROS2 control, motor drive with functional safety, and multi-sensor vision.

Architecture Flexibility

The same system concept can be divided differently as sensor counts grow, AI workloads shift, or robot variants diverge, without changing design environment or vendor.

From Evaluation to Deployment

Robotics developers need a path from hardware evaluation to repeatable deployment. The Quartus^® Prime software is the design environment for that path, used to configure the programmable device and integrate hardware logic, with Nios^® V soft processors available as an embedded processor option for control, management, or housekeeping functions where the chosen device and design use it.

Where the selected device and workflow support it, FPGA AI Suite is used to develop an FPGA-based AI accelerator, covering model preparation, compilation, and resource mapping. Framework and device support vary by release, so check the current tool documentation before committing to a model or a target. On the robotics software side, the ROS Consolidated Robot Controller reference design shows how FPGA-side functions connect to a robotics software stack.

Reference Designs & Demo Videos

Reference Design Name	Description	Resources
ROS Consolidated Robot Controller	Deterministic ROS2-based controller for robotics and AMRs	Watch Video View Reference Design
Drive-On-Chip with Functional Safety	SIL-ready motor control for safe industrial robotics	View Reference Design
Drive-On-Chip with PLC	Soft PLC implementation for industrial automation	View Reference Design
Holoscan Sensor Bridge (MIPI → 10GbE)	High-speed sensor aggregation for AI perception systems	View Reference Design
4Kp60 Multi-Sensor HDR Camera	High-resolution multi-camera HDR vision system	Watch Video View Reference Design
4Kp30 Multi-Sensor Camera + AI	Multi-camera platform with onboard AI inference	View Reference Design
HPS TSN 3x2.5G SGMII	TSN-enabled deterministic Ethernet networking example	View Reference Design
Sensor Fusion Platform (PIB)	Multi-sensor integration platform for AMRs and edge gateways	View Reference Design
Smart Camera Demo Kit	Embedded vision demo for industrial robotics and inspection	Request Access to Reference Designs

Robotics IP Portfolio

Perception & Vision	I/O Sensor Interfaces	Networking Interfaces	Motion Control & Feedback
MIPI D-PHY	I2C Controller	Ethernet	Quadrature Encoder
GigE Vision Host	UART (D16450)	EtherCAT Master
USB3 Vision Device	Mixed-Signal ADC/DAC	CAN Controller
Camera Link Frame Grabber	LVDS Tunneling
CoaXpress Host	Holoscan Sensor interfaces
JESD204B/C

Development Kits

Device Family	Development Kit Name	Key Capabilities
Agilex® 5 FPGAs and SoC FPGAs	Agilex 5 FPGA and SoC E-Series 065B Modular Development Kit	Designed for high-performance prototyping in AI, networking, and embedded systems
	Agilex 5 FPGA E-Series 013B Development Kit	PCIe* Gen4, DDR4, high-speed transceivers, HPS, modular robotics, and AI
	Sulfur Agilex 5 SoM Development Kit	Compact SoM, machine vision, embedded robotics
	AXE5 Eagle Development Board	Industrial prototyping, high-speed I/O, robotics validation
	Terasic DE-25 Nano	Compact platform, embedded control, academic and robotics prototyping

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