Real-Time control of Humanoid Robots using OpenJDK

Abstract

At IHMC we create state of the art walking algorithms for humanoid robots in Java. We successfully used our Java algorithms to control the Atlas humanoid, a 150kg robot with 28 actuated degrees of freedom, in the Darpa Robotics Challenge, placing second in an international competition. To execute our control loops within the deadlines imposed by the robot (1ms), we have brought POSIX real-time threads to the OpenJDK using a JNI library. Lockless synchronization primitives are used to communicate between the different threads, while Garbage Collection is avoided altogether. We have released the IHMCRealtime library created for this project under the Apache license.