The Ballbot

Disclaimer

This project is shared for informative purposes. 
The original records of this project are present on the University server. 
Please use this project for reference only.

Author

Prasheel Renkuntla - GitHub

I am pursuing my Master's in Robotics at the University of Maryland, College Park. My primary area of interest is in Vision integrated Robot Systems.

Overview

The ballbot is an omnidirectional balancing mobile robot. This project discusses the author's approach to the design and development of the dynamic model and control architecture of the robot. Balancing Control and Station Keeping Control are two main controllers that can be simulated without a real robot. The results are verified with simulation in MATLAB and SIMULINK.

Dependencies

• MATLAB - Installation

Run

To run the main program and design the State Space, run the file - mainBallBot
To verify the simulation results of balancing control, run the file - balancingControl
To run the simulation of the stationkeeping control, use this file - stationKeepingControl

Demo

The output from the balancing control for the stabilisation of body angles (phi) can be seen in the image below-

Balancing Control on Body Angle

Following image shows the stabilisation of body angle (phi) when subject to stationkeeping at a given constant point -

Station Keeping Control output

The trajectory plot is also shown in the output folder.

References

• T. B. Lauwers, G. A. Kantor, and R. L. Hollis. A dynamically stable single-wheeled mobile robot with inverse mouse-ball drive. In Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006., pages 2884-2889. IEEE, 2006.
• U. Nagarajan, G. Kantor, and R. Hollis. The ballbot: An omnidirectional balancing mobile robot. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 33(6):917-930, 2014.
• U. Nagarajan, G. Kantor, and R. L. Hollis. Trajectory planning and control of an underactuated dynamically stable single spherical wheeled mobile robot. In 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages 3743-3748. IEEE, 2009.