Design, Dynamic Analysis And Computer Simulation Of A Spherical Rolling Robot

With the expansion of the human being's activity and exploration, mobile robots become more important. But mobile robots, traditionally designed with wheels and track, are difficult to move in some critical environment. The spherical construction offers extraordinary motion properties in cases where turning over or falling down will bring risks during motion. A spherical rolling robot, which is a nonholonomic system and has full capability to recover from collisions with obstacles, can be used to survey unstructured hostile industrial environment or explore other planets. In addition, a spherical rolling robot, can quickly move as a wheeled robot and also can come over obstacles as a legged robot. The spherical robots designed before have some shortcomings, so a novel spherical rolling robot is presented in this paper. The robot is designed symmetrically, with every component placed diametrically opposite on the sphere. It moves ahead by two motors ,which are attached to the shell, driving the corresponding screw transmission mechanism respectively, and turns by changing the position of the barycenter.The mathematical model of the robot is simplified by separating the inside drive unit as the driving force of the shell, while the spherical rolling robot dynamics is precisely analyzed by using D'Alembert Lagrange principle and nonholonomic system theory. Then its six different model of actual motion is created by ADAMS and its motion capability, including moving in straight line or circular arc, is also proved to be good through emulated by ADAMS. Finally, the model is co-simulated by ADAMS and MATLAB.