Akihiro Morinaga

The paper deals with the dynamics of a spherical rolling robot actuated by internal rotors that are placed on orthogonal axes. The driving principle for such a robot exploits nonholonomic constraints to propel the rolling carrier. A full mathematical model as well as its reduced version are derived, and the inverse dynamics are addressed. It is shown that if the rotors are mounted on three orthogonal axes, any feasible kinematic trajectory of the rolling robot is dynamically realizable. For the case of only two rotors the conditions of controllability and dynamic realizability are established. It is shown that in moving the robot by tracing straight lines and circles in the contact plane the dynamically realizable trajectories are not represented by the circles on the sphere, which is a feature of the kinematic model of pure rolling. The implication of this fact to motion planning is explored under a case study. It is shown there that in maneuvering the robot by tracing circles on the sphere the dynamically realizable trajectories are essentially different from those resulted from kinematic models. The dynamic motion planning problem is then formulated in the optimal control settings, and properties of the optimal trajectories are illustrated under simulation.