Computer control system and walking pattern control 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 and moment sensors, inertial attitude sensors and vision sensors. Therefore an effective control system is crucial for the humanoid robot. In this paper, we propose a distributed computer system consisting of the online planning sub-system and the real-time motion control sub-system based on CAN bus and Ethernet for humanoid robots. CAN bus is used for distributed real-time motion control and Ethernet is used for non-real-time and large data quantities communication between the online planning and motion control sub-systems. The Windows and RT-Linux are used as operating systems for the online planning and motion control sub-systems respectively. The walking pattern control modifies the planned walking pattern based on sensory information when there are unexpected sudden events. The effectiveness of our proposed computer system and walking pattern control method was confirmed by walking experiments on our newly-built humanoid robot.