A CORBA-based approach for humanoid robot control

Recently, many control architectures for robots have been proposed. However , in these architectures, it is difficult to add new functions to existing applications or add new applications. Moreover, developing a robot control system using many researchers makes it difficult to cooperate with each oth er. In order to deal with these problems, we propose a Humanoid Robot Contr ol Architecture (HRCA) based on Common Object Request Broker Architecture ( CORBA). The proposed HRCA is organized as a client/ server control architec ture. The HRCA is implemented as an integration of many humanoid robot cont rol modules, which correspond to CORBA servers and clients. By applying the se to "Bonten-Maru I" a humanoid robot, which is under development in our l aboratory, we describe the HRCA modules and the effectiveness of HRCA. We c onfirmed the effectiveness of HRCA from simulation and experimental results . By using the proposed HRCA, the control of the humanoid robot in a distri buted environment such as a Local Area Network (LAN) is possible and thus v arious humanoid robots in the world can share their own modules with each o ther via the Internet.