The Spherical Wheeled Robot (Ball-Bot) is a family of robots that can maintain balance standing on a ball and use it as its wheel to move around. In recent years, there have been several successful Ball-Bot designs. We attempt to develop a new spherical wheeled robot product named "Q-Baller" to study its dynamics and control system. The Q-Baller has been designed to ahieve the economic and effective prototyping. A detailed dynamic model of the mechatronic system has been established and analyzed. Control studies have been conducted based on the dynamic models, and new control methods has been proposed to realize continuous gain scheduling. Exclusive simulations have been performed to test the performance of the controllers and reference planning. The Q-Baller hardware has been prototyped and functional. Robotic circuit board, human machine interface and embedded control system have also been developed to make up the full robotic system. The Q-Baller prototype will be tested after the system is fully adjusted, and further researches in control and robotics will be conducted in the future.
Research and development of Q-Baller -- a spherical wheeled robot
