A Fluid-Actuated Driving Mechanism for Rolling Robots

There are important issues in the design of the driving mechanism for the rolling robots. The actuator is expected to operate without occupying the whole space of the carrier body. This property gets harder to achieve as the degree of freedom in driving mechanism increases. This paper proposes an alternative fluid actuator for rolling bodies e.g., sphere or disc. The designed mechanism has a circular pipe that is propelled by rotating spherical mass (core) inside a fluid medium. In this work, we first establish the dynamics of the rolling circular pipe. Then, the internal driving unit is modeled and combined with rotating mass dynamics. Finally, the model simulations are conducted for observing motion patterns of the carrier body and locomotion abilities of the rotating core. The results show the feasibility of the proposed actuator for future applications.