SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE AND TASK DEFINITION OF A MULTIPLE HUMANOID COOPERATIVE CONTROL SYSTEM

This paper presents a cooperative control software architecture that coordinates a team of multiple humanoid to complete a mission by collaborating with each other. The mission of the humanoid team is decomposed into tasks and distributed to each humanoid to be executed. Each task is described by the proposed humanoid action primitives, which are designed to abstract broad classes of humanoid tasks appropriately. In particular, missions and tasks for the humanoid team are designed by using a finite state machine with a developed user interface. The multiple humanoid cooperative control software consists of 3 layers: the mission layer, task layer, and action layer. The software architecture has scalability to the number of humanoids and the number of assigned missions with its framework based on the CORBA middleware, which integrates many different functionalities of the humanoid. The feasibility and robustness of the implemented software architecture are verified through successful completion of the mission assigned to the humanoid team while each humanoid performs its given task sequentially.