A Sphere Moving Mechanism Conbining Internal and External Unit and its Horizontality Keeping Ability

Abstract

Recently, omnidirectional moving AMR (autonomous mobile robot) are researched. For some kind of transportation application, AMR is required to have a horizontality keeping ability by itself. A robot which ride on a sphere and moves omnidirectionally is already proposed and the robot can keep horizontality. But the robot must slightly tilt to an accelerating direction when start to move. We propose a robot with all direction moving ability and keep horizontality during acceleration and deacceleration. The proposed robot is composed of external unit and internal unit. Both unit have all direction moving ability by three omni wheels. External unit rides on a sphere and it maintains horizontality. On the other hand, internal unit moves inside the sphere and controls the moving direction and moving speed of the sphere. We compared the proposed robot, with external unit and internal unit, to a robot with only an external unit. By our experiment, it was evaluated that the proposed robot can keep much more horizontality. It is also indicated that the proposed robot can move with much higher acceleration, and can move on a slope with keeping horizontality.