EtherCAT and Real-Time Software for Humanoid Robotics Applications
Industry Overview
Humanoid robotics is at the forefront of innovation in automation, enabling machines to replicate human-like motion, perception, and decision-making across a range of applications from manufacturing and logistics to healthcare, service industries, and disaster response. These highly complex systems integrate dozens of synchronized servo axes, real-time sensor feedback, and intelligent AI processing into compact embedded platforms.
To meet the rigorous demands of natural motion, real-time balance control, and situational awareness, humanoid robot developers require ultra-low-latency communication and precise synchronized coordination across all systems. acontis technologies delivers these capabilities through advanced EtherCAT and Real-Time Hypervisor software solutions, enabling next-generation humanoid platforms to move fluidly, adapt intelligently, and react in real time.
Industry Challenges
Coordinated Multi-Axis Motion Control
Humanoid robots feature numerous servo-controlled joints across the spine, arms, legs, and hands, often exceeding 30–40 synchronized motion axes. Achieving lifelike movement requires sub-millisecond precision and full deterministic coordination between drives.
acontis’ EC-Master EtherCAT MainDevice stack enables ultra-fast communication across all motion components with minimal jitter. By leveraging advanced features such as Distributed Clocks (DC) and Split Frame Processing, EC-Master enables developers to achieve highly synchronized, smooth joint trajectories even in complex full-body motion scenarios. Furthermore, acontis offers Optimized Real-time Ethernet Drivers that dramatically improve the performance and reliability of EtherCAT implementations.
This level of determinism is critical not only for natural gait and movement but also for real-time balance corrections, obstacle avoidance, and task execution in dynamic environments.
Sensor Fusion and Feedback Loops
Humanoids rely on real-time integration of diverse sensor types, including IMUs, torque sensors, joint encoders, LiDAR, and microphones. These sensors must be polled, fused, and responded to in a single control cycle for proper balance and interaction.
acontis EC-Master supports high-frequency feedback loops and precise timestamping across distributed devices, making real-time sensor fusion and reactive control possible. Additionally, EC-Monitor provides passive network analysis for verifying timing constraints and identifying anomalies without interfering with runtime performance.
To meet the growing processing demands of AI and real-time sensor data, acontis has teamed up with NVIDIA to bring optimized EtherCAT performance to Jetson platforms like Orin and Thor. This pairing gives humanoid robots the power to analyze vision, audio, and movement data in real-time while still maintaining the precise and deterministic control required for EtherCAT-based motion. It’s a powerful combination that brings perception and action together on a single, unified platform.
Deterministic Real-Time Communication
Maintaining dynamic balance, executing collision-free motion, and adapting to external stimuli all require guaranteed, low-latency communication between the MainDevice application and distributed drives, sensors, and I/O.
acontis’ EtherCAT MainDevice stack delivers hard real-time responsiveness, ensuring that command and feedback cycles are completed with microsecond-level determinism. This minimizes jitter, delays, and unpredictability that could otherwise lead to instability or failure in motion-critical tasks such as walking, climbing stairs, or reacting to disturbances.
For systems with multiple concurrent control loops (e.g., limb kinematics, balance control, and sensor polling), acontis’ software enables developers to structure deterministic communication architectures that scale across all sub-systems in a full humanoid robot.
Hardware Resource Constraint
Space, power, and weight constraints are constant challenges in humanoid robotics. Running real-time motion control, AI inference, and supervisory applications on a single compact computing platform requires architectural efficiency and OS consolidation.
With acontis Real-Time Hypervisor (RTOSVisor or LxWin), developers can run multiple operating systems—such as Real-time Linux for control tasks and Windows or Linux for AI/ROS applications—on the same embedded PC. This allows deterministic control domains to remain isolated and performant, while high-level logic and UI services coexist without requiring additional hardware.
The combination of acontis’ Real-Time Hypervisor and Jetson-class edge hardware results in a powerful solution for developers seeking to reduce complexity, weight, and power draw while maintaining uncompromised control performance.
Modular and Hot-Pluggable End Effectors
Humanoid robots may be designed with interchangeable hands, tools, or sensor modules depending on the application. Supporting this flexibility requires the ability to hot-connect or swap devices without rebooting the system or rebuilding the EtherCAT network configuration.
With acontis’ Hot Connect feature pack for EC-Master, humanoid developers can design modular architectures that support dynamic device attachment and removal. This allows new end effectors, tools, or subsystems to be added on the fly, whether for development testing or field-level task changes, without sacrificing uptime or real-time performance.
acontis also offers a powerful EtherCAT Simulation library, EC-Simulator, that can be utilized to test the EtherCAT MainDevice application. For example, EC-Simulator can be used to force SubDevice failure, cable breaks, and countless more error states, many of which are difficult or impossible to replicate in physical systems.
