Flexible Control System of a Robot Hand Using Micro Control Units and RT-middleware

摘要

This paper proposes flexible and efficient control system of a robot hand for intelligent human-interactive tasks. The intelligent tasks require various sensors and lots of software. We designed the hardware and software of the control system. The hardware includes a PC and multiple micro control units (MCUs) so that various sensors such as range sensors, acceleration sensors and photo sensors can be added flexibly and efficiently. The calculation in the system can be distributed to the PC and the multiple MCUs. The software system is designed so that various software elements can be easily integrated. RT-middleware is utilized for the integration. Two applications of the system are presented to show the flexibility of the system. The hand is integrated with range sensor in one application and microphone in the other. The results of the experiments show the effectiveness of the control system.