Simple Motion Planning Strategies for Spherobot: A Spherical Mobile Robot

Mobile robots have been traditionally designed with wheels and few have explored designs with spherical exo-skeletons. A spherical mobile robot that offers to have a number of advantages, is proposed in this paper. The success of our design is contingent upon develop ment of control strategies, for reconfiguration of the sphere. In this paper we address the open-loop control problem and present two strategies for reconfiguration. The first strategy uses spherical triangles to bring the sphere to a desired position with a desired orientation. The second strategy uses a specific kinematic model and generates a trajectory comprised of straight lines and circular arc segments. As compared to exisiting motion planners, our strategies require less computation and provide scope for easy implementation.