Design Roadmap for Non-Holonomic Spherical Robots Driven by Two Pendulums

Spherical Robots, despite their unique structural advantages over other types of mobile robots, are still far from realizing their potential. In this paper, we analyze the causes of the slow development pace of the spherical robots and attribute it to the adoption of the conventional robot design roadmap by the research and engineering community for the development of these robots. To address this, we propose a new robot design roadmap, which we call “Test before Design” or in short “TBD”, which focuses on grasping the dynamics of the underlying drive units via experiments at the initial stage. We discuss the current key challenge in the spherical robots driven by two pendulums, which is mainly the dynamic modeling for the turning of the robot. Finally, we present the design of a simplified experimental setup to navigate through the ongoing key challenge in the development of spherical robots driven by two pendulums based on the TBD approach.