Dynamic Analysis of an Amphibious Single Wheel Robot, Part 1: Moving in Straight Path

A single wheel, gyroscopically stabilized robot is a sharp-edged wheel actuated by a spinning flywheel for steering and a drive motor for propulsion. The spinning flywheel acts as a gyroscope to stabilize the robot and it can be tilted to achieve steering. In this paper first the kinematics of a single wheel robot, like Gyrover, in water is considered and then a simple mechanism for its movement in water is proposed. After hydrodynamic analysis of the robot a complete dynamics model is designed with Lagrange energy method. The only simplification used here is neglecting the added mass effect in hydrodynamic analysis. This complete model can be used for examining the behavior of the robot in designing a controller. This work is a significant step towards a fully automatic control of such a dynamically stable but statically unstable robots.Copyright © 2007 by ASME