The recent DARPA Robotics Challenge trials demonstrated many of the barriers of the current robotic technology, the complexity of the system development and the effort required to reach the performances needed to address practical tasks within unstructured environments. Both software and control architectures have major effects on the final robot capabilities. Designing effective control architecture for complex robotic systems, such as humanoid robots, still remains a challenge requiring to deal with the integration of a large number of software components. Considering the interest of the robotics community on humanoid robots, the aim of this paper is to discuss and highlight the pros and cons of the different control approaches in humanoid platforms. Following this, we introduce the control architecture developed, based ROS and YARP, for tele-operation of the humanoid robot COMAN.