A new modular schema for the control of tumbling robots

Abstract

Tumbling is an exciting new area of robotic locomotion that takes advantage of ground-body interactions to achieve rich motions with minimal hardware complexity. The increased mobility of tumbling robots, however, comes at the price of increased control complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel method to handle the issues of tumbling locomotion which takes the problem and separates into locally independent subproblems. Our approach provides an intuitive geometric solution to the tumbling control problem without sacrificing performance. We provide a running example throughout the paper to help solidify the ideas presented.