Design and Control of a Humanoid Robot for Traffic Guidance

In this paper, a humanoid traffic guidance robot with 9 active degrees of freedom (DOF) is designed to relieve the traffic pressure and improve the working safety situation for the road traffic policemen and road maintenance workers. The proposed robot is able to perform the standard traffic command gestures such as turning left, turning right, slowing down and stopping according to the feedback signal of a radar sensor. Besides, there is a digital camera capturing the high resolution images of the vehicles having a speed higher than the preset limitation. The image information is recorded in a SD memory card and can be used to check the illegal driving history. The mechanical structure, the kinematics and the control system are described. On each robot joint a PID controller is implemented for trajectory tracking control. Several preliminary experiments have been implemented to verify the effectiveness of traffic conducting in the laboratory environment and realistic application.