A rolling robot: Design and implementation

Even though many researchers have studied spherical mobile robots, a robot with an elastic external frame can hardly be in the literature. Therefore in this study the pendulum-driven spherical mobile robot is introduced. The external frame of the robot is designed as glass fiber sticks which show good elastic characteristics. All control modules, such as a Zigbee wireless communication module and battery, are embedded into the spherical mobile robot. Atmega 2560-based embedded system is adopted as a main controller to drive the robot along desired path. This study also introduces driving and steering dynamic model of the pendulum-driven type spherical robot and performs experiments to verify the models. Based on the model, a PID controller is implemented and good mobility of the robot is verified.