This paper presents the design, analysis, and testing of a fully actuated modular spherical tensegrity robot for co-robotic and space exploration applications. Robots built from tensegrity structures (composed of pure tensile and compression elements) have many potential benefits including high robustness through redundancy, many degrees-of-freedom in movement and flexible design. However, to t...

This paper describes a type of mobile robot with a spherical shape designed to act as a platform to carry sensing devices or actuators in an environment where the conditions are harsh and the stability of the mechanical platform is critical. A remotely controlled internal unit drives the spherical robot. The paper focuses on the design and motion control of a robot with a spherical shape. The d...

Spherical mobile robot has good static and dynamic stability, which allows the robot to face different kinds of obstacles and moving surfaces, but the lack of effective control methods has hindered its application and development. In this paper, we propose a direct approach to path planning of a 2DOFs (Degrees of Freedom) spherical robot based on Bellman’s “Dynamic Programming” (DP). While othe...

This paper presents an amphibious spherical robot that consists of a sealed upper hemispheroid, two quarter spherical shells, and a plastic circular plate. It has a plastic shelf for carrying themicro-robots, and four actuating units for movement. Each unit is composed of a water-jet propeller and two servomotors, each of which can rotate 90° in the horizontal and vertical directions. The robot...

With the goal of supporting close-range observation tasks of a spherical amphibious robot, such as ecological observations and intelligent surveillance, a moving target detection and tracking system was designed and implemented in this study. Given the restrictions presented by the amphibious environment and the small-sized spherical amphibious robot, an industrial camera and vision algorithms ...