Multi-Process Control Software for HUBO2 Plus Robot

© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Presented at the 5th Annual IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Practical Robot Applications (TePRA 2013), 22-23 April 2013, Woburn, MA.DOI: 10.1109/TePRA.2013.6556374Humanoid robots require greater software reliability than traditional mechantronic systems if they are to perform useful tasks in typical human-oriented environments. This paper covers a software architecture which distributes the load of computation and control tasks over multiple processes, enabling fail-safes within the software. These fail-safes ensure that unexpected crashes or latency do not produce damaging behavior in the robot. The distribution also offers benefits for future software development by making the architecture modular and extensible. Utilizing a low-latency inter-process communication protocol (Ach), processes are able to communicate with high control frequencies. The key motivation of this software architecture is to provide a practical framework for safe and reliable humanoid robot software development. The authors test and verify this framework on a HUBO2 Plus humanoid robot