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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

Multi-wheel statically-stable mobile robots tall enough to interact meaningfully with people must have low centers of gravity, wide bases of support, and low accelerations to avoid tipping over. These conditions present a number of performance limitations. Accordingly, we are developing an inverse of this type of mobile robot that is the height, width, and weight of a person, having a high center of gravity, that balances dynamically on a single spherical wheel. Unlike balancing 2-wheel platforms which must turn before driving in some direction, the single-wheel robot can move directly in any direction. We present the overall design, actuator mechanism based on an inverse mouse-ball drive, control system, and initial results including dynamic balancing, station keeping, and point-to-point motion.

Notes

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Microdynamic Systems Laboratory

Associated Project(s): Dynamically-Stable Mobile Robots in Human Environments

Number of pages: 6

Text Reference

Tom Lauwers, George A. Kantor, and Ralph Hollis, "A Dynamically Stable Single-Wheeled Mobile Robot with Inverse Mouse-Ball Drive," Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '06), May, 2006, pp. 2884 - 2889.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Lauwers_2006_5457,
   author = "Tom Lauwers and George A Kantor and Ralph Hollis",
   title = "A Dynamically Stable Single-Wheeled Mobile Robot with Inverse Mouse-Ball Drive",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '06)",
   pages = "2884 - 2889",
   month = "May",
   year = "2006",
}

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