Design of communication interface and control system for intelligent humanoid robot

Currently, robot applications have been fast expanding to many areas such as entertainment, home task, security, medical care, etc. With an increasing robot demand, the development of highly reliable and low-cost robot control system has become a hot research field in recent years. However, most robot control system requires special interface design or suffers from complexity or high cost. This phenomenon poses a great difficulty for students to learn such a robot development knowledge from a traditional classroom. Accordingly, this paper aims to propose a simple but reliable robot communication interface and local-loop control system based on RS232 and 8051 microprocessor, suitable use as lecture material for various kinds of robot control. In this proposed scheme, the robot action commands stored in the database using C++ Builder can be transmitted from the command-transmission microprocessor (CTM) and then received by the individual authorized action-processing microprocessor (APM) via RS232. Every APM is responsible to its respective robot's joint so that there are up to tens of modules to be operated for a variety of robot actions simultaneously and independently. Real-time implementation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of robust, simple, flexible, and efficient performance. (c) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 20: 454467, 2012