Design and analysis of a spherical mobile robot

A spherical mobile robot, rolling on a plane with the help of two internal rotors and working on the principle of conservation of angular momentum has recently been fabricated in our group. The robot is a classic nonholonomic system. Path planning algorithms exist in the literature for certain classes of nonholonomic systems like chained form systems, nilpotent systems and differentially flat systems. The model of this spherical mobile robot however, does not fall into any of these classes and hence these existing algorithms are rendered inapplicable to this system. The final objective is to make this robot as a testbed for feasible path planning and feedback control algorithms.