A real-time walking robot control system based on Linux RTAI

This study developed a real-time control system for a walking robot. The control system for the walking robot should have a real-time operating system, a small size, and extendable IO cards. The PC104 computer is selected due to its small size, reliability and availability of many IO cards. The Linux RTAI is selected because it is an open-source, efficient and hard real-time operating system. The Turbo PMAC PC104 card is used to control motor drivers because its small size, multi-axis synchronization and powerful control functions. Compared with CAN or EtherCAT bus control scheme, this system can easily support motor drivers from different companies. The software is reusable to different robots due to its independence on communication bus protocols and motor drivers. The motor control experiments are provided to show the satisfactory real-time control performance.

I. Introduction

Walking robot, with its flexibility, multi-DOF, better adaptive to unstructured environment, is able to access virtually 100% of the earth's land surface¹. Although many research works in this field have been done, scientists are still interested, especially after the Bigdog² created by Boston Dynamics, Inc shows its high performance and great potential to the world. Motion control system is the fundamental element to the robot system if motors are chosen as actuators. Almost all the actions of the robot are finally attributed to the movement of the motors, which are implemented by the motion control system.