Bioloid Extension Project

Introduction

The Bioloid humanoid robot is manufactured by Robotis. It is based on 18 Dynamixel AX-12+ servos, connected by a proprietary (but open) common bus. The original central processing unit of the robot is based on a ATMega128 microcontroller. The goal of this board is twofold:

1. to replace the existing microcontroller by a better CPU
2. to distribute the data link of the CPU with the servos among several parallel buses

The new computing platform considered is a gumstix board. The interface of the gumstix with the servos is performed by an extension board. This extension board, its schematics and PCB layout, are made available to the community in this web page.

References

• Ricardo Oliveira and Rodrigo Ventura. Development of a computing platform for the bioloid humanoid robot. In Proceedings of RecPad 2010, 2010.