A control architecture to achieve manipulation task goals for a humanoid robot

Abstract

Focusing on the manipulation tasks to be executed by humanoid robots, principal requirements which are to be satisfied by hardwarelsoftware of the control system are considered. In order to meet the requirements, a novel type of hardware structure and software architecture is proposed in this paper. Since the target humanoid robot consists of multiple subsystems such as a central controller for brain, a vision controller for eye, and five motion sub-controllers for two arms, two hands, one spine, the on-board hardware control system is designed to have a distributed control structure connected by pseudo realtime Ethernet interfaces. A goal-achieving software architecture is also proposed which meets the requirements of semi-autonomy, reactivity, expandability, and object-orientedness. Specifically, in order to achieve the reactivity, a coordination method is proposed to configure three kinds of executive modules, primitive module, flow-control module, and goal module, which have multiple exit states. The control architecture proposed has been implemented for performing toy-block assembly tasks on a humanoid robot as well as on the graphic simulator. ？ 1998 IEEE.