Distributed Motion Controllers for a Humanoid Robot

Student: Andrew Hood

Supervisor: Gordon Wyeth

Category: Engineering Thesis Project - Robotics

A 4-foot tall little metal man, dubbed GuRoo, he was fully designed and built at the University of Queensland in 2001. GuRoo was conceived in February 2001 with the ultimate goal of building a fully autonomous humanoid robot that would play soccer. He spent 12 months gestating in the minds and on the paper of 12 final year engineers. By early 2002 the robot was born, after 4 months of undergoing numerous tests on his stand (the robot equivalent of crawling) GuRoo took his first steps in April 2002.

The topic of this thesis was to bring the paper design of the motion controllers into reality and to a functional state. In doing so, conduct a thorough review on the entire operation of the control system. The hardware was then redesigned, improving on the old system and adding a mechanism for initial alignment of joints.

The 2001 motor control design was realized through a distributed control system which implements the velocities for each joint generated in a central computer. Each of these distributed controllers drives multiple motors. They receive messages from the central computer broadcast on a CAN (controller area network) bus. The distributed control system – as opposed to a system in which control for every joint is done on one processor – was found to be very effective. The method in which the local control was implemented however meant that the control algorithm could run at a maximum speed of 250 Hz, while the desired speed is 2kHz. The bottleneck of the system has been identified, and addressed in the 2002 revision of the boards. The new boards will also have precise and accurate starting positions for each joint, as well as being more power efficient, smaller, and have greater motor protection

Thesis Document (PDF)

Movie Download

Poster Presentation (PDF)