Modular, expandable and reconfigurable robot

The subject invention provides a modular, expandable and reconfigurable robotic system. In one aspect of the invention there is provided a robot having at least two manipulators each having several compact rotary joints. The rotary joints have one input coupling and either one or two output couplings. Each joint is modular including a d.c. brushless motor coupled with a harmonic cup drive and includes position, velocity and torque sensors. Each manipulator may be disassembled and reassembled to assume a multitude of configurations. In another aspect of the invention there is provided an expandable and modular real-time computer control system for controlling the robot. The computer architecture achieves between 5 to 10 MFLOPS with reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processor nodes and a fast point-to-point communication network. Each node includes a host computer and parallel input/output (I/O) modules as well. The nodes are controlled by nearly zero-overhead real-time operating system (OS) kernels responsible for task scheduling, communication and user-interface. Each node is capable of controlling 8 joints at 1 kHz while executing over 1000 floating point operations per joint in each sampling interval.