Designing an Inertia Actuator with a Fast Rotating Gyro inside an Egg-shaped Robot
This work addresses locomotion challenges for compact, self-contained robots, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing gyroscopic principles.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling robot motion using internal gyroscopic actuation, resulting in two egg-shaped robot prototypes that can move forward and turn without external actuators.
In this paper, we describe features of two new robot prototypes that are actuated by an actively controlled gyro (flywheel, symmetric rotor) inside a hollow sphere that is located in the middle of the robots. No external actuators are used. The outside structure of the robots and the gyro are connected by a gimbal, which is similar in structure to a control moment gyroscope in spacecrafts. The joints of the gimbal can be actuated. In this way, the orientation of axis for the gyro in relation to the egg can be changed. Since the inertia of the fast rotating gyro is large in relation to the outside structure, a relative rotation of the axis against the outside structure results in a motion of the egg by inertia principle. In this way, we can use this principle for controlling the robot to move forward and turn around. The robots are shaped as spheroidal ellipsoids so they resemble eggs. So far, we have built and tested two robot prototypes.