Stability Control of an Amphibious Single Wheel Robot

Abstract

Single wheel robots are typically those kinds of robots which contain all the necessary mechanizations, namely the stabilization and driving mechanizations, within a shell-liked housing appearing analogous to a wheel. These robots have proved to be useful in various fields of industry due to their advantages of giving high instant acceleration and maintaining high cruise speeds for considerable amount of time in addition to being compact and small. It is a sharp-edged wheel actuated by a spinning flywheel for steering and a drive motor for propulsion. The spinning flywheel acts as a gyroscope to stabilize the robot and it can be tilted to achieve steering. In this paper first the kinematics of a single wheel robot, like Gyrover, in water is considered and then a simple mechanism for its movement in water is proposed. After hydrodynamic analysis of the robot a complete dynamics model is designed with Lagrange energy method. Then a stabilizer controller is designed to balance the robot with nonlinear control approach. For simplicity the added mass effect in hydrodynamic analysis, has been neglected. This complete model can be used for examining the behavior of the robot in designing a controller.