Tetsuya Taira

Design and implementation of reconfigurable modular humanoid robot architecture

This paper describes the design and implementation of reconfigurable modular humanoid robot architecture. Our proposed architecture features three key concepts: 1) a reconfigurable mechanical structure; 2) a layered software model; and 3) an end-to-end real-time communication mechanism. Our proposed reconfigurable modular humanoid robot consists of several functional robots such as an arm robot, a mobile robot, and a head robot to realize an effective reconfigurable mechanism for expandability. Depending on many purposes of researchers and users, our reconfigurable modular humanoid robot can be used as some kinds of humanoid robots or as several autonomous functional robots. We design and develop a prototype modular humanoid robot consisting of five functional robots for evaluating our proposed architecture. The results of the experiences show the modular humanoid robot can achieve expandability by our reconfigurable mechanism.

Functionally Distributed Control Architecture for Autonomous Mobile Robots

We propose a functionally distributed control architecture for real-time control of robot systems. The robot control must be processed in real-time while deadline is fulfilled. The operations of robots are basically processed in parallel and I/O peripherals are unevently distributed. Then it would be more efficient to process in parallel than in serial. To extract those natures, robots should be designed as functionally distributed control systems, with each functional module having a PU(Processing Unit). Since each module has its own PU, it can process independently. And asynchronyous interrupts are used to inform other modules of events that occurs inside the module or among modules. The whole system is composed of several functional modules, and a brain module plans and schedules the whole system. A prototype of personal robots based on the functionally distributed control architecture realizes a quick response time and a short processing time against an event occurrence. The control is controlled in real-time.

2P2-C23 Design and Implementation of an Arm Module for a Modular Humanoid Robot

This paper describes the modular robot arm which adapts a humanoid to various tasks required in actual environment. Our modular robot arm achieves high performance without improving athletic ability, and decentralize a processing to FPGA which embedded in each module. Since additional circuits that implemented in the module controller holds down a frequency of operation, maintaining a short control cycle, it leads to reduction of power consumption.

2P1-B10 Development of a Bipedal Module for Modular Humanoid Robots

In this paper, the development of a bipedal module for modular humanoid robots is described. We intended the development of the reconfigurable robot that can reconfigure the system according to necessity, and can develop each element by researchers. This bipedal module is designed to be able to operate by itself. It has a multiple module controller and distributed processing is done to improve the processing performance and save the electrical power consumption. This module has 12 degree of freedom in total, and it is possible to move flexibly. The architecture described above was implemented. We evaluated the performance of the actuator, degree of freedom, the range of movability, and power consumption.