Design and Implementation of a Spherical Robot for Radiation Monitoring

In this paper, a radiation monitoring spherical robot prototype combined with a Geiger-Muller (GM) tube dose rate counter is presented. Specially used in the daily task, compared to traditional radiation monitoring robot style, the spherical robot has the characteristic of smaller, more mobility, more safety to the unstructured indoor environment. This robot is driven by an Internal Driven Unit (IDU), which consists of three symmetrically placed omni-wheels. The electronic control system is conducted by MCU running FreeRTOS. Considering the basically kinematic, the relation between the rotation of each wheel and the motion of the robot is proposed. The radiation monitoring experiment result shows that the vibration produced by the robot motion does not influence the GM tube’s function, which proposes more application possibility in the future.