Considering the requirements of high scientific return, low cost, less complexity, and more reliability for robot proposed by extreme environment exploration task on planet surface, this article comprehensively reviews history special spherical used extraterrestrial surface summarizes environmental characteristics difficulties different surface. This compares advantages types ground robots poin...

Bimanual manipulation of objects is receiving a lot of attention nowadays, but there is few literature addressing the design of the arms configuration. In this paper, we propose a way to analyze the relative positioning of two redundant arms, both equipped with spherical wrists, in order to obtain the best common workspace for grasping purposes. Considering the geometry of a robot with a spheri...

There are more and more buildings with complicated shape emerging all over the world. Their walls require constant cleaning which is difficult to realize. In this paper, based on analyzing the characteristics of the working target,a new kind of auto-climbing robot is proposed, which is used for cleaning the spherical surface of the National GrandTheatre in China. The robots’ mechanism and uniqu...

This work presents an innovative solution for moisture monitoring in precision farming by using ground vehicles. The real innovation lies on using non-common robots such as spherical robots. This particular vehicle has turned out to be suitable for performing monitoring tasks in crop fields mainly due to its spherical shape, small size, low weight and traction system that do not produce soil co...

This paper studies local configuration controllability of multibody systems with nonholonomic constraints. As a nontrivial example of the theory, we consider the dynamics and control of a multibody spherical robot. Internal rotors and sliders are used as the mechanisms for control. Our model is based on equations developed by the second author for certain mechanical systems with nonholonomic co...

This paper introduces a minimalistic approach to produce a visual hybrid map of a mobile robot’s working environment. The proposed system uses omnidirectional images along with odometry information to build an initial dense posegraph map. Then a two level hybrid map is extracted from the dense graph. The hybrid map consists of global and local levels. The global level contains a sparse topologi...

This paper investigates the dynamics and control aspects of the linear motion of a pendulum-driven spherical rolling robot. The dynamic model is deduced for the linear motion of a spherical robot by using the Euler-Lagrange formulation. By appropriate definitions the equations of motion for the robotic system are transformed into the state space form. A novel decoupled sliding mode control appr...

Real-world environments such as houses and offices change over time, meaning that a mobile robot’s map will become out of date. In previous work we introduced a method to update the reference views in a topological map so that a mobile robot could continue to localize itself in a changing environment using omni-directional vision. In this work we extend this longterm updating mechanism to incor...

In this paper we develop two noble mechanisms for im proving the motions of humanoid robots The double spherical joint is a six DOF joint that consists of six sin gle DOF mechanical pairs in series with their axes inter secting at a point The double spherical joint replaces two hip joints six DOF of humanoid robot and even provides the equivalent function of waist joints without actually adding...