An Open Control Architecture for a Distributed Robot Controller

Abstract

This paper presents an open control architecture for a highly distributed robot controller and its application to the humanoid robot, Centaur, under developed at KIST (Korea Institute of Science and Technology). While existing commercial robot controllers are based on a centralized controller, this paper proposes a highly distributed compact controller connected through the real-time networks, with which modularity and vendor-neutral openness are easily achieved in hardware level. In the software point of view, the control jobs for a humanoid robot are classified into four major levels, and they are coded using reusable software blocks that are executed by multiple distributed processing nodes as well as by a single centralized controller. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed control architecture, a testbed system is implemented using VMEbus-based and CAN network-based controllers.