A SIMPLE AND EFFICIENT CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR WALKING ROBOTS - Application to AMRU5

Abstract

A decentralized control architecture has been developed on the walking machine AMRU5. The vehicle is actuated by 18 DC motors, which have to be highly synchronized to produce a smooth motion of the robot body. Each leg has 3 motors driven by a microcontroller. The six microcontrollers communicate with a PC running real-time Linux which manages the feet motion generation to produce the desired gait. The complete control chain has been developed using standard freely available C tools.