Design, analysis and experiments of an omni-directional spherical robot

This paper presents a novel design of an omni-directional spherical robot that is mainly composed of a lucent ball-shaped shell and an internal driving unit. Two motors installed on the internal driving unit are used to realize the omni-directional motion of the robot, one motor is used to make the robot move straight and another is used to make it steer. Its motion analysis, kinematics modeling and controllability analysis are presented. Two typical motion simulations show that the unevenness of ground has big influence on the open-loop trajectory tracking of the robot. At last, motion performance of this spherical robot in several typical environments is presented with prototype experiments.