High-Frequency Multi Bus Servo and Sensor Communication Using the Dynamixel Protocol
Abstract
High-frequency control loops are necessary to improve agility and reactiveness of robots. One of the common limiting bottlenecks is the communication with the hardware, i.e., reading of sensors values and writing of actuator commands. In this paper, we investigate the performance of devices using the widespread Robotis Dynamixel protocol via an RS-485 bus. Due to the limitations of current approaches, we present a new multi-bus solution which enables typical humanoid robots used in RoboCup to have a control loop frequency of more than 1 kHz. Additionally, we present solutions to integrate sensors into this bus with high update rates.
Keywords
Robotics Humanoid Servo Sensor Control Bus Open sourceNotes
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the Hamburg Bit-Bots for support. Thanks to team Rhoban for making their hardware and software open source. This research was partially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in project Crossmodal Learning, TRR-169.
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