A control synthesis for reducing lateral oscillations of a spherical robot

A controller have been designed in this paper to improve the motion control performance of a spherical robot during its travel. Due to the robot dynamics lateral oscillations develop in its longitudinal motion inherently. To model this behavior, an external moment signal has been utilized as a noise to deviate the robot from its original path. Then using system identification techniques some mathematical models have been developed to relate the original movement and lateral oscillations of the robot to the motors position and moment signal respectively. The model obtained from system identification has been verified by experiments on the fabricated robot. To validate the design, the controller has been placed in a closed loop control circuit using software in the loop simulation environment.