Humanoid Soccer Player and Educational Robotic: Development an Architecture to Connect the Dynamixel AX-12A Servo Motor from ROBOTIS to the Raspberry Pi 3B

In one of its roles, Robotic seeks to stimulate the knowledge and learning in science areas to teenagers, young people and adults, trying to bring them closer to mathematical and physical problems of the real world. To do that, they need a very robust platform that allows build, play and validate real experiments. The target of this paper is to present an architecture that allows a Robotic Player built using a Bioloid ROBOTIS Premium platform to play soccer in the category of Kid-Size RoboCup Humanoid League. This architecture is composed by an Electronic Project, Vision System and Robotic Player. In the Electronic Project, a shield named Raspi2Dynamixel was developed to connect the Dynamixel AX-12A servo motor from ROBOTIS with Raspberry Pi 3B. Also, the AX12-JavA library was created to make the communication between them. In the Vision System, a webcam was connected to the USB port in Raspberry Pi 3B. With the proposed architecture, it is possible to expand the applications using the AX-12A servo motors, not only for humanoid soccer player but also for other applications, especially in the Educational Robotic field. In order to prove that the proposed architecture works well, the movements of the Robotic Player were shown in the results. In addition, it is important to highlight that has not found in the existing literature any other shield that can perform the communication between Raspberry Pi 3B and AX-12A servo motors using Java language.