FPGA Design for Controlling Humanoid Robot Arms by Exoskeleton Motion Capture System

Abstract

In this paper, hardware implementation of control and interface between two robots for teleoperation tasks are designed and implemented on two field programmable gate array(FPGA) chips. The first FPGA chip is designed for collecting data from the master robot which is the motion capturing device that captures motions of a human operator who wears it. The second FPGA chip is used for controlling motions of the slave robot which is the humanoid robot arms as a counter part of the master robot. Captured motions from the master robot are transferred to the slave robot to follow the movement after the master robot. All hardware design such as PED controllers, communication modules between two robots, encoder counters, and PWM generators are implemented on an FPGA chip. Experimental studies of motion following tasks are conducted to demonstrate the FPGA controller design.