EtherCAT Master for Laelaps II Quadruped

Hello, we are Aristoteles and Thanasis and we are going to present you our work with the legged team of the Control Systems Lab on our new EtherCAT master for our Laelaps II quadruped. EtherCAT communication protocol is a high performance industrial ethernet technology that comprises a master-slave architecture and is suitable for both centralized and decentralized systems enabling full duplex communications. Here you can see our Laelaps 2 quadruped; Each leg has 2 actuated degrees of freedom and the robot’s control architecture involves high-frequency loops and precision feedback sensing. Concerning the EtherCAT network, it consists of master PC and several bare metal microcontrollers acting as slaves in a daisy chain topology. This project started as a diploma thesis by Mike Karamousadakis here at CSL.

00:49 - Me and Aristoteles are developing the next version, where, we will update to the latest EtherLAB mercurial changeset, go from Ubuntu 16 to 20 with kernel 5.4 rt patched and of course to ROS Noetic and finally to ROS2. We intend to create a maintainable standalone ROS package which we will make available to the community, with automated installation scripts. We are almost in the middle; the automated installation is ready, and our code is running on Ubuntu 20 with kernel 5.4. Here are some indicative results all the data handled by Laelaps II EtherCAT network.

01:30 - The red lines are the target toes trajectory for each leg while the black lines are the actual response. Of course, there are similar packages available but according to our research, ether_ros has multiple advantages involving complete integrability of the EtherCAT protocol kernel space runtime & several diagnostic features, among others. In this slide you can see the team’s members involved in the project. Thank you and hope to see you in New Orleans .