An increasing interest in the design of mobile robots has been observed in recent years, which is mainly motivated by technologic al advances that may allow their application to consumer markets, in addition to industrial areas. Although sophisticated techniques have been developed, choosing the appropriate hardware-software partitioning and programming robot functions are still very complex tasks. Current approaches often involve the design and implementation of hardwired solutions, with the

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... sociated problems of a long development cycle and inflexibility. In this paper we present a framework called ARCHITECT-R, which aims to design and program specialized hardware for robots based on FPGAs. We also present the first results obtained using this framework.