Research & Design On Navigation System For A Spherical Mobile Robot

The spherical mobile robot is a new type of robot appearing in recent years, which has a ball-shaped outer shell to encompass all its mechanism, control devices and energy sources. Spherical mobile robot is characterized as simple, compact, well-sealed structure and agile motion. It is capable of rapid maneuvers and movement, moreover it can both roll in any direction and turn with zero radius. As a consequence, it has broad applications in military, civilian and industrial fields; the study of spherical mobile robots has attracted many researchers' attentions, and become a research focus of the intelligent robots.However, for decade's research it still lays in the probe stage and is far from practical usage. One of the critical reasons is that the navigation system has not been properly tackled. the precise control and intelligent of spherical mobile robot need to install a large number of sensors. Well-sealed structure and agile motion are the advantages of spherical mobile robot. But on the other hand, these two features make the sensor installment and information collection become difficult, and the autonomous motion based on the integrated navigation and multi-sensor fusion technology also difficult to achieve ,too. Therefore, this thesis devotes to develop the navigation system of spherical mobile robots.In this thesis. At first, considering the structure and motion feature of spherical mobie robot, the sensor requirements analysis was described, a spherical mobile robot sensor system was developed. Then the whole process of designing and implementing the navigation control system were discussed. Considering the features of the vision system , Researches on the vision navigation technology of spherical mobile robot were discussed. Based on this study the image segmentation, outline extraction technology and object recognition were discussed. The real-time vision capture and processing system of the spherical mobile robot bases on the software package: VC++ and DH-SDK were developed. And at last, using three experiments to verify the effectiveness of this navigation systems.At the end of the thesis the summary and prospect were given.