Design of a reconfigurable humanoid robot

This paper deals with the design and realization of a reconfigurable humanoid robot. The related design concept and the mechanical structure including kinematics for a robot are presented and discussed. In order to give it a flexibility of structure, a main controller of the robot is deployed with an FPGA, which can load the user configurable logics as well as Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) based on its own microcomputer structure. Since it has an internal high performance microprocessor system, bus architecture, and memories, some different kind of application algorithm under the various situations can be replaced with reconfigurable hardware. These kinds of structure will be very effective in the field of application like a humanoid robot requiring for the small space and compactness of the structure. The suggested configuration method is testified through simple walking in real world and as a result, the proposed reconfiguration method is applied successfully in a humanoid robot and verified its validness from the experiment.