Control of a Spherical Robot Rolling Over Irregular Surfaces

Pendulum-Driven Spherical Robots are a type of spherical robot whose motion is achieved by controlling two motors for longitudinal and lateral motion. This configuration makes the robot a non-holonomic system, which impedes it from navigating directly towards a target. In addition, controlling its motion on inclined irregular surfaces is also an issue that has not received much attention. In this work, we addressed these two issues by proposing a methodology to control both motors using PID controllers. However, we propose tuning the controller’s gains using stochastic signals for the longitudinal controller because by varying the motor’s torque, the robot is more susceptible to destabilization in combination with a classical gain tuning methodology for the second controller. Our results indicate that this enables the robot to perform motion on inclined irregular surfaces. We also propose using semicircular trajectories to plan the robot’s motion to reach a target successfully even when moving on inclined irregular surfaces. We have carried out experiments in the Webots simulator, showing that our approach does not overshoot while reaching a settling time of almost 0. These results outperform the Ziegler-Nichols PID controller