Balancing Control Algorithm for a Single-Wheeled Mobile Robot

Abstract

There have been lots of interest on service and entertainment robots. To ensure that robots work in harmony with humans, their stability and compactness are some of the key issues. Obviously, robots with fewer wheels occupy a smaller floor area compared to those with more wheels. In addition, robots with fewer wheels, whose posture stabilities are maintained by feedback control, are stable even under larger accelerations and/or higher locations of the center of mass. To facilitate controller design, it is assumed that both pitch and roll dynamics are decoupled. The dynamic equations of motion for the proposed robot are derived from the Euler-Lagrange equation. To obtain the optimal balancing control law, linear quadratic regulator control methods are applied to the linearized dynamic equations. Simulation and experimental results verify the effectiveness and performance of the proposed balancing control algorithm for a single-wheeled mobile robot.