Archie is a

humanoid robot A humanoid robot is a robot resembling the human body in shape. The design may be for functional purposes, such as interacting with human tools and environments, for experimental purposes, such as the study of bipedal locomotion, or for other pur ...

, developed in

TU Wien TU Wien (TUW; german: Technische Universität Wien; still known in English as the Vienna University of Technology from 1975–2014) is one of the major universities in Vienna, Austria. The university finds high international and domestic recogn ...

(TUW) in

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

and

University of Manitoba The University of Manitoba (U of M, UManitoba, or UM) is a Canadian public research university in the province of Manitoba.Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

. The development of Archie started in 2004 at the Institute of Handling Robots and Devices (IHRT) under supervision of Professor Peter Kopacek. Archie is in class a Teen size Humanoid and is over 120 cm tall. Lower body of Archie is designed and driven using

brushless motors A brushless DC electric motor (BLDC motor or BL motor), also known as an electronically commutated motor (ECM or EC motor) or synchronous DC motor, is a synchronous motor using a direct current (DC) electric power supply. It uses an electronic ...

that are able to provide 50 Nm moment after the gearbox output. For Archie's joints Harmonic drives are employed in order to decreasing the size of the design and increasing the efficiency of the Robot. Each joint is controller individually and can provide a high performance

motion control Motion control is a sub-field of automation, encompassing the systems or sub-systems involved in moving parts of machines in a controlled manner. Motion control systems are extensively used in a variety of fields for automation purposes, includi ...

. All the joints are connected to central control unit using a customized high speed network. Archie's central controller unit is called Spinal system which is designed to control the whole robot as well as maintaining the balance of the robot. For the balance in the robot, the "Spinal system" uses the feedback from the joints and the data from an

inertial measurement unit An inertial measurement unit (IMU) is an electronic device that measures and reports a body's specific force, angular rate, and sometimes the orientation of the body, using a combination of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and sometimes magnetometer ...

(IMU). Electronic design and implementation of Archie is done by Ahmad Byagowi as his PhD thesis required project.

Control System

The control system of Archie is based on a hierarchy structure with a central controller. The central controller which entitles an HydraXC50 (Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGA) is designed to run a Real Time Linux (RT-Linux) beside some application based hardware. For instance, the communication (back and forth) between the central controller and the joints of the robot is designated as a task for the application based hardware. As a rough explanation, the communication hardware used in the central controller acts like a graphic card. Detailed explanation can be found in related reference.

Notes

Bipedal humanoid robots University of Manitoba TU Wien 2004 robots Robots of Austria Robots of Canada {{robotics-stub