Design, Fabrication, and Characterization of a Hybrid Bionic Spherical Robotics With Multilegged Feedback Mechanism

Spherical robots have many desirable traits when designing mass efficient systems interacted with unstructured terrain. In this letter, we propose a hybrid bionic spherical robot based on the morphological properties of sea urchins and the movement characteristics of tumbleweeds. This robot enables it to move freely in harsh terrain with the distributed high-aspect-ratio telescopic units, where our control strategy is based on a central pattern generator, and combines foot pressure measurements and actuator state information. In particular, these data from multiple foot pressure sensors also are used to compute the robots’ center of mass, with evaluating locomotion state during rolling maneuvers. The experimental results show the ability of our design to provide reliable pose estimates, also overcoming a challenge in the field of mobile robotics, including switch directions flexibly in harsh terrain due to their anisotropy.