Design, modeling and controllability of a spherical mobile robot

A spherical mobile robot, rolling on a plane with the help of two internal rotors and working on the principle of conservation of angular momentum has recently been fabricated in our group. The robot is a classic example of a nonholonomic system for which many existing algorithms do not easily apply. The objective is to study feasible path planning algorithms on this system. In this paper, we present the design details of the spherical robot fabricated along with the hardware used. We use Euler parameters which describe a unit quaternion for orientation of the robot and develop mathematical model to avoid singularity problem. We also prove controllability of the system in the quaternion space.

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