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Published May 2016 | public
Book Section - Chapter

Reduced dynamical equations for barycentric spherical robots

Abstract

Barycentric spherical robots (BSRs) rely on a noncollocated center of mass and center of rotation for propulsion. Unique challenges inherent to BSRs include a nontrivial correlation between internal actuation, momentum, and net vehicle motion. A new method is presented for deriving reduced dynamical equations of motion (EOM) for a general class of BSRs which extends and synthesizes prior efforts in geometric mechanics. Our method is an extension of the BKMM approach [1], allowing Lagrangian reduction and reconstruction to be applied to dynamical systems with symmetry-breaking potential energies, such as those encountered by BSRs rolling on a surface. The resulting dynamical equations are of minimal dimension and vehicle motion due to actuation and momenta appear linearly in a simple first-order differential equation. The EOM of a BSR named Moball [2] [3] are derived to illustrate the approach's utility. A simple table summarizes our algorithm's application to popular BSRs in the literature, and the approach is extended to sloped terrains.

Additional Information

© 2016 IEEE. This work was supported by a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship (NSTRF), NASA's Earth Science and Technology Office (ESTO), and California Institute of Technology's von Karman graduate fellowship. The authors thank Dr. Thomas Wagner for early support of this project, and Prof. Richard Murray for helpful conversations on this topic.

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 19, 2023