Efficient Hardware Primitives for Interval Contractors in Robotics and Integration to a Custom RISC-V ISA Extension

Interval analysis is commonly used in mobile robotics to solve nonlinear problems. Typical implementations mostly rely on software libraries which perform poorly on low-power embedded devices. This article shows how interval primitives can be ported on FPGA and integrated to the RISC-V architecture using a custom ISA extension called xinterval. The novelty of this approach is the emphasis on elementary interval contractors which are higher-level abstractions than plain interval arithmetic especially well suited for robotics applications.