Comparative Trial for FPGA-Based Low-Latency Distributed Control System on Multi-DOF Humanoid Equipped with Easily-Available Computer

Abstract

Many products of small and high-performance computers have got easily-available in the market of recent years. In this paper, we examine the system architecture on humanoids equipped with these computers for high-performance and low-latency control of robot hardware. We developed and evaluated a few types of control systems which employ the FPGA boards with the recent popular high-speed communication links such as USB 2.0, EtherCAT, and Gigabit Ethernet. It is demonstrated that lower-latency control of humanoids can be achieved with FPGAs and high-speed communication links.