Distributed real-time processing for humanoid robots

A humanoid robot is a real-time system controlled by a complex computer system that requires huge computing power for perception and planning, high energy efficiency for self-contained control, reduction of physical dimensions, and high reliability. This paper proposes a distributed architecture for the humanoid robot control substituting conventional centralized control architectures. In addition to the parallelism that provides scalable computing power at low clock namely at low energy, the distributed architecture contributes to reliable operations by replacing many fragile analog signal wires with a digital network with redundant routes. In order to accomplish a real-time control over the network, RMTP (Responsive Multi-Threaded Processor) for parallel and real-time computation has been newly designed. RMTP can synchronize more than thirty nodes distributed over a robot body in less than 5 micro second with a realtime network called the Responsive Link (RL). Architectures of RMTP, RL and Linux-based real-time system software are presented.