This paper introduces reconditioning: a novel systematic technique for reducing unnecessary power consumption of asynchronous gate-level netlists, which involves the optimal reordering of conditional communication and logic primitives. Our technique is applicable to asynchronous circuits with handshaking protocols that encode data and control together, in particular, quasi delay insensitive and 1-of-N handshaking circuits. Both an optimal integer linear program (ILP) and a fast heuristic algorithm are presented. We show that our ILP is feasible for moderate size circuits and our heuristic algorithm scales to much larger circuits, completing in seconds on circuits with tens of thousands of gates. Our experimental results show power improvement highly depends on the structure of the circuit but can often be above 26% with typically less than 5% area overhead.

Recent advances in mobile robotic technology has given rise to new types of robotic applications called personal robotics. The main feature of these applications is that they require low cost robots that involve assisting people in doing their everyday jobs such as providing personal assistance, commercial security, mobile tele-conferencing, tele-presence, home services, entertainment, and elderly care. In this paper we introduce a low cost and general purpose mobile robotic platform called MILO. It offers unique hardware and software features which make MILO suitable for a wide spectrum of personal robotic applications. MILO possesses PC architecture and runs on Windows XP. We have experimentally evaluated MILO's performance. Preliminary results show that MILO can be effectively used to develop personal robotic applications.

In this paper, we show how to use Verilog HDL along with PLI (Programming Language Interface) to model asynchronous circuits at the behavioral level by implementing CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) language constructs. Channels and communicating actions are modeled in Verilog HDL as abstract actions.