control circuit of a humanoid robot (something like i-cub or Asimo)

[mez9500]

hello everybody
my friend and I are building the upper body of a humanoid robot for our MSc thesis project. There are 24 dc motors in this robot the thing I want to know is what is the best way to command these motors simultaneously?


the design i had in mind is for each motor to have it's own micro for position and velocity control and then one master micro to command and control the slave micros. if this is the best way to go how does the master micro command slave ones simultaneously?

another question I have is what is the best micro for the robot to go with between arm and pic? i want the master micro to receive it's command from pc.
any help would be appreciated. thank you.

 

[Misterbenn]

the design i had in mind is for each motor to have it's own micro for position and velocity control and then one master micro to command and control the slave micros.

Yeah that's how I'd go about it. Most coms ports will be faster than the motor control anyway so will appear almost simultaneous - but this wouldn't be fast enough to implement any type of balance or 'reactionary' control. Not a great deal of difference between ARM and PIC so i'd go with what ever one you're more familiar with.

 

[mez9500]

hi thank you for you reply but could u be more specific about the coms i mean which one would you go with?
thanks

 

[Misterbenn]

I2C would be easiest as its directly supported by most chip sets and allows for addressing.

However for a larger more distributed system you may need a good degree of noise tolerance so then industry standard coms like RS232 or CAN