Development of an educational environment for online control of a biped robot using MATLAB and Arduino

This paper describes the development of innovative low-cost educational platform to study and control a biped robot in real-time using MATLAB and Arduino board. MATLAB was used as a control and visualization environment, while the Arduino board was utilized as a final controller for the servo motors as well as a Data Acquisition Card (DAC). However, it is important to recognize that there is much more knowledge to learn to control a robot, such as hardware (sensors, actuators) knowledge, software knowledge and control theory. But, it is important to emphasize that this paper is merely focused on the hardware and software development which can be utilized to accomplish many tasks like controlling the walking motion. Here the platform set up and the algorithm adopted in controlling the servos as well as reading from the sensors are described such that any student can reconstruct and start using it to understand his/her subject.