Distributed Control System for a Humanoid Robot

A humanoid robot generally has more than thirty DOFs to be controlled in real-time and needs to deal with information of multiple sensors such as encoders, force, gyro, acceleration and vision sensors. Therefore an effective control system is crucial for the humanoid robot. In this paper, we propose a distributed control architecture for humanoid robots based on the combination of Memolink and CAN bus. This architecture consists of a vision and hearing processing sub-system for vision information processing, a tele-operation sub-system and a realtime motion control sub-system. The operating systems of this architecture are composed of Windows and RT-Linux. The Windows OS is used as the operating system of the former two subsystems to process multimedia and tele-operation information tractably. Linux and real-time RT-Linux OS are used as the operating system of motion control sub-system to achieve the realtime control capability. The biped walk experiments show that this control architecture is effective, reliable and tractable.