A real-time controller development framework for high degrees of freedom systems

Recently, the rapid development of high DOFs systems such as humanoids raises the need for a common and real-time control platform. Most works of control platforms focus mainly on software by C/C++. However, the lack of realtime becomes the limitation on controlling such complex robotic systems. In this paper, we present a real-time controller development framework for high DOFs systems. To take the best advantage of Hardware Description Language (HDL), a distributed field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) controller network is provided. This framework also consists of robotic middleware and programming environment. The proposed scheme allows control of a wide class of robotic systems in hard real-time. A control platform under the framework is designed and applied on several mechatronic systems. Experiments are presented to show the performance on current computing hardware.