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Advancing humanoid robotics with Single Pair Ethernet By Diana Lahl, Product Marketing Engineer and Dhane Jones, Robotics Systems Engineer, Texas Instruments Humanoid robots are becoming more complex and precise, with a higher number of degrees of freedom (DOF) and an AI-powered central compute engine, and are now capable of assessing, adapting, and responding to the surrounding environment within milliseconds.
Figure 1. SPE interface
D esigning these advanced humanoid robots requires a communication system that can support high-bandwidth, real-time data transfer across numerous joint controls, all within a space-constrained lightweight framework that remains reliable and robust in noisy industrial environment. TI Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) PHYs address these challenges and simplify system architecture for humanoid’s seamless motion execution. Simpler system architecture and lighter weight with SPE To achieve high update rates and high bandwidth (of up to 1000Mbps) for the joint control, an advanced real-time
control system architecture is required. Ethernet-based systems simplify architecture by providing a single, high-bandwidth communication standard that facilitates data exchange between multiple system components. Further use of SPE (xBASE-T1) technology, as shown in Figure 1, and or daisy-chain topology can reduce the overall size of the wiring harness, playing a crucial role in minimising the robot’s weight – an essential factor in humanoid robots, where lower weight enhances mobility, energy efficiency, and balance. Advancing robotics with Single Pair Ethernet PHYs TI’s portfolio of SPE PHYs is designed to be footprint compatible with both TI’s 100BASE-T1 and 1000BASE-T1 PHYs. Single board design allows for upgrades to the feature set or bandwidth in future developments with no hardware changes. This approach helps to accelerate development cycles and reduce time-to-market, thus saving R&D costs.
Figure 2. Possible time stamping locations
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