Rolling mobile robot using decentralized mass-driver units

This paper proposes a new kind of rolling mobile robot, consisting of a cylindrical outer shell and multiple autonomous mass-driver units inside it, each of which is capable of moving a mass along the radial axis. We design a simple decentralized (i.e., based only on local information) control law for individual unit, and theoretically show that the resulting motion would converge to constant-speed rolling depending on the choice of control parameters. Moreover, by extending this idea to three-dimensional, we propose a spherical rolling robot with radial mass-driver units, and designed a decentralized control law (inspired by phototaxis) to realize whole-body rolling and chasing for a given light source.