This paper presents a novel design for a mobile robot based on the kinematics of parallel mechanisms. The robot consists of 3 legs, each equipped with an asynchronous driving unit. The legs are connected to the driving units with spherical joints and to the upper plate with a revolute joint. Three additional encoders, attached to the upper revolute joints provide redundant data. This data is us...

A simplified kinetic model called Spring Pendulum is developed for a spherical rolling robot with soft shell in order to meet the needs of attitude stabilization and controlling for the robot. The elasticity and plasticity of soft shell is represented by some uniform springs connected to the bracket in this model. The expression of the kinetic model is deduced from Newtonian mechanics principle...

The current work addresses the problem of 3D model tracking in the context of monocular and stereo omnidirectional vision in order to estimate the camera pose. To this end, we track 3D objects modeled by line segments because the straight line feature is often used to model the environment. Indeed, we are interested in mobile robot navigation using omnidirectional vision in structured environme...

In this paper, a new method was proposed for the navigation of a mobile robot in an unknown dynamic environment. The robot could detect only a limited radius of its surrounding with its sensors and it went on the shortest null space (SNS) toward the goal. In the case of no obstacle, SNS was a direct path from the robot to goal; however, in the presence of obstacles, SNS was a space around the r...

In this paper we present a geometric control law for position and line-of-sight stabilization of the nonholonomic spherical robot actuated by three independent actuators. A simple configuration error function with an appropriately defined transport map is proposed to extract feedforward and proportional-derivative control law. Simulations are provided to validate the controller performance.

Due to their efficient locomotion and natural tolerance to hazardous environments, spherical robots have wide applications in security surveillance, exploration of unknown territory and emergency response. Numerous studies have been conducted on the driving mechanism, motion planning and trajectory tracking methods of spherical robots, yet very limited studies have been conducted regarding the ...

This paper describes a new laser-based computer vision system used for automatic fruit recognition. Most relevant vision studies for fruit harvesting are reviewed. Our system is based on an infrared laser-range finder sensor generating range and reflectance images and it is designed to detect spherical objects in non-structured environments. A special image restoration technique is defined and ...

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...

This paper presents a long-term experiment where a mobile robot uses adaptive spherical views to localize itself and navigate inside a non-stationary office environment. The office contains seven members of staff and experiences a continuous change in its appearance over time due to their daily activities. The experiment runs as an episodic navigation task in the office over a period of eight w...