Motion Generation Interface of ROS to PODO Software Framework for Wheeled Humanoid Robot This paper discusses the development of robot motion generation interface between a realtime software architecture and a nonrealtime robot operating system. In order for robots to execute intelligent manipulation or navigation, close integration of highlevel perception and lowlevel control is required. However, many available opensource perception modules are developed in ROS, which operates on Linux OS that donu0027t guarantee RT performance. This can lead to nondeterministic responses and stability problems that can adversely affect robot control. As a result, many robotic systems devote RTOS for lowlevel motion control. Similarly, the humanoid robot platform developed at KAIST, Hubo, utilizes a custom realtime software framework called PODO. Although PODO provides easy interface for motion generation, it lacks interface to highlevel frameworks such as ROS. As such, we present a new motion generation interface between ROS and PODO that enables users to generate motion trajectories through standard ROS messages while leveraging a realtime motion controller. With the proposed communication interface, we demonstrate series of manipulator tasks on the actual wheeled humanoid platform, MHubo. The overall communication interface responsiveness was at most 27 milliseconds.

FPGAROS: Methodology to Augment the Robot Operating System with FPGA Designs Robotic applications are becoming more complex every day because they rely on multiple heterogeneous sensors and actuators, increasing the computational demand. Energy efficiency becomes an important factor to consider as battery powered robots have limited energy budget. Algorithms have to be carefully implemented to achieve the expected performance. Consequently, there is a need to increase performances of embedded devices for robotics in terms of computational power and energy efficiency. This work presents a methodology to design an architecture for custom embedded hardware applications implemented in Field Programmable Gate Arrays to be compatible with the mainstream Robot Operating System (ROS). Therefore, highly computational algorithms can be implemented as a dedicated hardware module to increase the processing power of any heterogeneous robotic system. A modular design is foreseen to ease the adaptability to changes in the system. A generic interface for all modules is chosen leading to fully customizable messages to exchange data internally or with other parts of the distributed systems.