Motion control of a spherical mobile robot

Abstract

The paper deals with dynamics and control of a special type of mobile robot designed to act as a small platform to carry sensing devices or actuators in an environment where stability of the platform is critical, like in surveying unstructured hostile industrial environment or exploring other planets, or simply being a part of a human place, like office or home, which has not been designed for mobile machines. The spherical construction offers extraordinary motion properties in cases where turning over or falling down are risks for the robot to continue its motion. Also it has full capability to recover from collisions with obstacles or another robots traveling in the environment.

Development of Stable Ballbot with Omnidirectional Mobility

“…볼봇은 지면과 점접촉을 이루므 로 마찰이 적고, 따라서 이동에 필요한 에너지 소모가 적으 며, 또한 전방향 이동성을 갖는다는 장점이 있다 [1]. 이러한 이유로 여러 연구기관에서 볼봇 관련한 연구가 수행되고 있는데, 그림 1은 여러 형태의 볼봇들을 보여준다 [2,6,7,10,12,13]. 볼봇의 구조는 크게 두 가지로 나누어지는데, …”

Sensorized robotic sphere for large exterior critical infrastructures supervision

“…Based on this formulation, Nagai 34 presented an extension for an inner pendulum-based system. Another alternative to a Lagrange formulation is a Newton formulation, first proposed for a robotic sphere by Halme et al 13 Assuming that the system is only able to move in one plane (i.e., forward and backward), the robot can be modeled as a two rigid-body system with a single DoF between them, as is shown in Fig. 3(a).…”

“…13,21,31 Since the main objective of this article is to contextualize the use of a robotic sphere in a real environment, we do not present a novel mathematical approach, which has been the subject of earlier contributions focusing on the development of mathematical and physics models of robotic spheres. Further information and more complex considerations can be found in Refs.…”

“…Nowadays, there are basically five alternatives to reach this objective. 12 The first concept is known as spring central member; 13,14 this alternative has a central body that includes a driven wheel on one of its ends and a passive wheel on the other, with a spring that guarantees contact of both wheels and the spherical-shaped body [see Fig. 2(a)].…”

Moving Eye - Interactive Telepresence Over Internet with a Ball Shaped Mobile Robot

“…When rim is rotated along the Z-axis (the contact points of the inner mechanics and rim change) and the rim plane is in horizontal position the heading of the inner mechanics change assuming that there is some friction between the ball cover and ground. [Halme et al, 1996 and ] and Spitzmüller [Spitzmüller, 1998]. To simplify the model the ball robot is reduced to point masses on a thin plate.…”