Development of Distributed Control System and Modularized Motor Controller for Expressive Robotic Head

摘要

This paper describes the development of a distributed control system and a small motor controller unit modularized to a controller module and motor driver modules for a humanoid robot. The humanoid robot, KOBIAN, had a centralized control system. It was difficult to increase the number of motors because of PC's I/O channel limit. We installed the distributed control system in the new head to increase the number of motors. Moreover, the modularized motor controller is developed to use in the various parts of the body. The small flexible motor controller is composed of a controller module and motor driver modules. Therefore, changing motor driver modules allows control of various components with the same controller module. This small motor controller unit can control 4 DC motors and read 8 channel of analog sensory data. We evaluated the performance of the developed motor controller and controlled the new robot's head.