Humanoid Robot Field-programmable Gate Array Hardware and Robot-operating-system-based Software Machine Co-design

Abstract

Keywords: humanoid robot, robot operating system, hardware and software co-design, embedded SoC, FPGA systemWe utilized the robot operating system (ROS) and the embedded system-on-a-chip (SoC) field-programmable gate array (FPGA) system to achieve the hardware and software codesign. A novel SoC FPGA processor system architecture is implemented by combining both ARM kernel and FPGA technologies. The advanced FPGA with the parallelized utilization and the powerful central processing unit (CPU) with universal abilities are adopted to complete the hardware and software co-design. The hybrid ROS-based control architectures efficiently communicate with each other at nodes to devise the correct sequential procedures and complete the full transformation of information in the distributed peer-to-peer topology. The humanoid robot platform design is intended to mimic the human body and its related motion to support various tasks. Humanoid robot machines have the limbs and trunk like the human body. The robot's structure routing comprises connections between sheet-metal parts and linking motors. Motors rotate joints to imitate human motion. Pose and pressure sensors are located at the waist and on the undersides of the two feet, respectively. Sensors intuitively perceive relational robot situations and outdoor environment information. A kernel control board functions like a human brain to gather the whole information. The controller analyzes an appropriated command for the motor driver board to realize the suitable joint motion of the robot. A detail humanoid robot machine design and its related working events in different experiments are shown in this study.