Geometric and control of a spherical mobile robot

Abstract

Mobile robots have been traditionally designed with wheels and few have explored designed with spherical exo-skeletons. This paper described a prototype and analytical study of a spherical mobile robot which is driven by two internally mounted motors. These motors which are located on the 2-DOF robot joints, induce the ball to move to arbitrary positions. Internal motors will move the mass point of the inner mechanism, thereby moving the robot. The kinematic model of spherical mobile robot will be derived in the quasi-static mode while the dynamic model is developed by Kane's method. Finally a PI and fuzzy controller are proposed separately and their deal with this problem is compared. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown via simulation.