球形移动机器人的研究进展与发展趋势

Research Progress and Development Trend of Spherical Mobile Robots

球形移动机器人(简称球形机器人)是一种拥有球形外壳的全封闭机器人,它通过质心偏移或者动量守恒等原理来实现运动。该类机器人具有良好的密封性,平衡性强且运动灵活性高,不存在侧翻问题,因此球形机器人在星球探索、危险环境探测等领域具有较大优势和广泛应用前景。然而球形机器人具有非完整约束、欠驱动、非链式等特点,导致其运动控制问题非常复杂且常规控制方法无法应用到它的运动控制上,阻碍了球形机器人的应用和发展。对国内外在球形机器人的机构设计、运动学和动力学建模方法以及控制方法等方面的研究进展进行回顾、综述与分析,其中也包括作者所在实验室对BHQ系列球形机器人研究工作的全面回顾;按照驱动方式对球形机器人进行归纳分类,并从运动学建模、动力学建模、开环控制和闭环控制四个方面介绍球形机器人研究的关键技术和发展趋势;最后针对球形机器人的研究进展和发展趋势给出五点结论。

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.