球形移动机器人的研究进展与发展趋势

Spherical mobile robot (spherical robot in short) is a fully enclosed robot with a ball-shaped outer shell, which can move by shifting its gravity center or through the principle of momentum conservation. Spherical robot has the characteristics of good sealability, high moving flexibility and strong stability as a roly-poly. Thus spherical robot has big advantages and wide future applications in the exploration of outer planets and the detection of dangerous environments. However, spherical robot is a special type of nonholonomic, under-actuated and unchained system, which makes its motion equations very complicated and the conventional methods cannot be applied to control it. This hinders the development and application of spherical robots. Review, summary and analysis of spherical robots' research progress on mechanism design, kinematics modeling, dynamics modeling, control methods and so on are given, including the comprehensive review of the BHQ series spherical robots developed by the authors' laboratory. The spherical robots are classified according to the driving modes. The key technologies and development trends of the research on spherical robots are introduced from four aspects: kinematics modeling, dynamic modeling, open-loop control and closed-loop control. At last, five conclusions about the research progress and development trend are given.