An embedded controller for a quadruped robot based on ARM and DSP

Abstract

The performance of controllers have deep influence on the capability of the quadruped robot. In this paper, we design and implement an embedded controller, which is made up of two parts: upper layer ARM controller and lower layer DSP controller. The ARM controller, integrated with a WIFI module to facilitate remote control by PC, is responsible for gait planning and sensors information processing. The DSP controller is mainly designed to receive real-time control commands from ARM controller via serial peripheral interfaces (SPI) and communicate with motor drivers through Controller Area Network (CAN) bus. To achieve fairly accurate control of the quadruped robot, four force sensitive resistors (FSRs) and a gyroscope are used on the quadruped robot. The developed embedded controller has been employed to control the quadruped robot Biodog, built at our lab. Using Hopf-based Central Pattern Generator (CPG) algorithm, we conduct experiments on the quadruped robot Biodog to test the embedded controller. The results demonstrate the efficiency of our controller for the rhythmic quadruped locomotion.