Geometric Kinematic Control of a Spherical Rolling Robot

Abstract

We give a geometric account of kinematic control of a spherical rolling robot controlled by two internal wheels just like the toy robot Sphero. Particularly, we introduce the notion of shape space and fibers to the system by exploiting its symmetry and the principal bundle structure of its configuration space; the shape space encodes the rotational angles of the wheels, whereas each fiber encodes the translational and rotational configurations of the robot for a particular shape. We show that the system is fiber controllable—meaning any translational and rotational configuration modulo shapes is reachable—as well as find exact expressions of the geometric phase or holonomy under some particular controls. We also solve an optimal control problem of the spherical robot, show that it is completely integrable, and find an explicit solution of the problem.