Electronic – how to determine architecture core detail of ARM11 processor

I have worked with self balancing robots in my bachelor and master thesis. Ad hoc I see these problems, that will very likely get in your way.

1. Self balancing robots are instable by definition. You have to collect data from your sensors (the camera) fast enough, to react to changes in the attitude of the robot. So the question is: can you process the information from the camera fast enough to stabilize the system (dead-time)?

2. Gyros will give you the angular acceleration along the axis. But with your camera you have something that correspond to the angle. To clarify this, you can not get the angular velocity or even angular acceleration with just one picture. You have to do some processing based on multiple pictures. That means you need more time => greater dead-time. Also this processing will probably introduce noise, which will complicate the controller design.

This can be done if the target application is defined. The easy way is to Write the code to solve a specific problem in a high-level compiled language and use a compiler that uses the full instruction set of the target. Then run the solution and benchmark it. This can be done even between for example 4 bit CPUs with no cache and high end pipelined 64bit CPUs. Don't forget that most modern so called CPUs are actually systems on chip SoC that include multiple cores, dedicated peripherals and coprocessor alike as the GPU and those can be used to boost the application speed. Also one of the most important things is code optimisation, you can use assembly for some applications but it is rarely used these days because it significantly increases the development cost so, the compiler is critical you can actually have a faster CPU running your application slower because of this.