Design and Modelling of Omnibola^©, A Spherical Mobile Robot

Abstract

A spherical mobile robot called Omnibola© is introduced and analyzed in this article. Some advantages of this kind of robot compared with typical wheeled robots are described. Its geometry and its features are presented, emphasizing on those which make it different from other ball-shaped robots. A mathematical model has been developed to have a tool to study our robot dynamics. We conducted some experiments to confirm that model results are similar to experimental results observed in the real robot. Either in experiments or in simulations, the robot's behavior is quite oscillatory. Because of this, a simple control law is proposed to stabilize that oscillatory motion.