Virtual humanoid robot platform to develop controllers of real humanoid robots without porting

Fumio Kanehiro, Natsuki Miyata, Shuuji Kajita, Kiyoshi Fujiwara, Hirohisa Hirukawa, Yoshihiko Nakamura, Katsu Yamane, Ichitaro Kohara, Yuichiro Kawamura, Yoshiyuki Sankai

Abstract: This paper presents a virtual humanoid robot platform (V-HRP for short) on which we can develop the identical controller for a virtual humanoid robot and its real counterpart. The unification of the controllers for the virtual and real robot has been realized by introducing software adapters for two robots respectively and employing ART-Linux on which real-time processing is available at the user level. Thanks to the unification, the controllers can share softwares with the dynamics simulator of V-HRP, including the parameter parser, kinematics and dynamics computations and the collision detector. This feature can make the development of the controllers more efficient and the developed controllers more reliable.