The Walk-Man Robot Software Architecture

Ferrati, Mirko; Settimi, Alessandro; Muratore, Luca; Cardellino, Alberto; Rocchi, Alessio; Hoffman, Enrico Mingo; Pavan, Corrado; Kanoulas, Dimitrios; Tsagarakis, Nikos G.; Natale, Lorenzo; Pallottino, Lucia

doi:10.3389/frobt.2016.00025

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…The WALK-MAN vision system is composed of a CMU Multisense-SL sensor that includes a stereo camera, a 2D rotating laser scanner, and an IMU. The robot control modules were based on GYM [24] (Generic Yarp Module), a component model to easily develop software modules for robotics leveraging the YARP ecosystem: YARP Based Plugins for Gazebo Simulator were used to validate the control modules in simulation. Whole-body control and inverse kinematics are solved through the OpenSoT control framework [25].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

XBot: A Cross-Robot Software Framework for Real-Time Control

Muratore¹,

Laurenzi²,

Tsagarakis³

2021

Robotics Software Design and Engineering

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The widespread use of robotics in new application domains outside the industrial workplace settings requires robotic systems which demonstrate functionalities far beyond that of classical industrial robotic machines. The implementation of these capabilities inevitably increases the complexity of the robotic hardware, control a and software components. This chapter introduces the XBot software architecture for robotics, which is capable of Real-Time (RT) performance with minimum jitter at relatively high control frequency while demonstrating enhanced flexibility and abstraction features making it suitable for the control of robotic systems of diverse hardware embodiment and complexity. A key feature of the XBot is its cross-robot compatibility, which makes possible the use of the framework on different robots, without code modifications, based only on a set of configuration files. The design of the framework ensures easy interoperability and built-in integration with other existing software tools for robotics, such as ROS, YARP or OROCOS, thanks to a robot agnostic API called XBotInterface. The framework has been successfully used and validated as a software infrastructure for collaborative robotic arms as KUKA lbr iiwa/lwr 4+ and Franka Emika Panda, other than humanoid robots such as WALK-MAN and COMAN+, and quadruped centaur-like robots as CENTAURO.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

XBot: A Cross-Robot Software Framework for Real-Time Control

Muratore¹,

Laurenzi²,

Tsagarakis³

2021

Robotics Software Design and Engineering

Self Cite

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“…32 Our main target platform is the iCub humanoid robot, 33 even though all YARP-compatible real and simulated robots are supported out-of-the-box. As an example, a previous work 17 showed a simulated whole-body controller running on both iCub and Walkman 34 robots.…”

Section: Framework Software Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

A generic synchronous dataflow architecture to rapidly prototype and deploy robot controllers

Ferigo

Traversaro

Romanò

et al. 2020

International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems

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The article presents a software architecture to optimize the process of prototyping and deploying robot controllers that are synthesized using model-based design methodologies. The architecture is composed of a framework and a pipeline. Therefore, the contribution of the article is twofold. First, we introduce an open-source actor-oriented framework that abstracts the common robotic uses of middlewares, optimizers, and simulators. Using this framework, we then present a pipeline that implements the model-based design methodology. The components of the proposed framework are generic, and they can be interfaced with any tool supporting model-based design. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach describing the application of the resulting synchronous dataflow architecture to the design of a balancing controller for the YARP-based humanoid robot iCub. This example exploits the interfacing with Simulink® and Simulink® Coder™.

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“…For the design of newer robots, the ETHERCAT Bus became increasingly popular, as it is fast, reliable and a widely-used technology. In-house made electronics are often used for the actual joint control and fault handling in such systems [17], [18]. In our experience, this greatly reduces the reliability and persistence of such solutions.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An EtherCAT-Based Real-Time Control System Architecture for Humanoid Robots

Sygulla

Wittmann

Seiwald

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE 14th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE)

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The design of humanoid robots naturally requires the simultaneous control of a high number of joints. Moreover, the performance of the overall robot is strongly determined by the low-level control system as all high-level software e.g. for locomotion planning and control is built on top of it. In order to achieve high update rates and high bandwidth for the joint control, an advanced real-time control system architecture is required. However, outdated communication protocols with associated limits in the achievable update rates are still used in nowadays humanoid robots. Moreover, the performance of the low-level control systems is not analyzed in detail or the systems rely on specialized hardware, which lacks reliability and persistence. We present a reliable and high-performance control system architecture for humanoid robots based on the ETHERCAT technology. To the authors' knowledge this is the only system, which operates at control rates beyond 2 khz and input/output latencies below 1 ms. Furthermore, we present a novel learning-based feedforward control strategy to improve joint tracking performance. This improved joint control method and the communication system are evaluated on our humanoid robot LOLA. Our software framework is available online to allow other researchers to benefit from our experiences.

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The Walk-Man Robot Software Architecture

Cited by 11 publications

References 14 publications

XBot: A Cross-Robot Software Framework for Real-Time Control

XBot: A Cross-Robot Software Framework for Real-Time Control

A generic synchronous dataflow architecture to rapidly prototype and deploy robot controllers

An EtherCAT-Based Real-Time Control System Architecture for Humanoid Robots

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