Control of Drive Motors for Humanoid Robot Head

The humanoid robot must mimic the verbal formulation of answers to a set of previously formulated questions. The sound emission of the answer is made with an ordinary rendering system, the sequence of syllables in the acoustic message must be correlated in time with the movements of the lips and mandible, but also with the movements of the head vertically and horizontally, as well as those of the eyes and eyelids, in order to create the impression of dialogue with a human personality. In this paper, the mechanical construction of the robotic head, modeled in CATIA software, as well as control of drive motors for the movements which are performed by the robot’s mechanisms, are described. The motors used in the construction of the humanoid head are of two types, direct current motors provided with built-in reducer and encoder for use in highly precise positioning and speed, and stepper motors whose position control and their bringing to the initial position, considered as a zero position, can only be performed by commanding a certain number of steps. The control of all motors is performed by means of a data acquisition board, which, in turn, receives the commands formed by the LabVIEW program. In this program, specific files have been developed for the set of movements that the robot must execute.