An innovative decentralised motion control architecture for a humanoid robot

This paper describes the recent steps taken at PMA in the development of a pair of legs for a humanoid robot. More specifically, the paper discusses the design of a decentralised motion control architecture for the robot. Several strong arguments for hierarchical and decentralised control are given. However, robust real-time and flexible implementation of such a decentralised architecture is not straightforward and should be handled with care. Therefore, some design principles to allocate responsibilities to the system’s different modules are provided. Preliminary tests have shown a satisfactory robust real-time behaviour of the implemented architecture and have proven its feasibility.