OmBURo: A Novel Unicycle Robot with Active Omnidirectional Wheel
This addresses the need for highly maneuverable robots in tight spaces shared with people, but it is incremental as it builds on existing unicycle and inverted pendulum concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of creating a compact, omnidirectional robot for human environments by introducing OmBURo, a unicycle robot with an active omnidirectional wheel, achieving dynamic balancing and preliminary results in station keeping and path following.
A mobility mechanism for robots to be used in tight spaces shared with people requires it to have a small footprint, to move omnidirectionally, as well as to be highly maneuverable. However, currently there exist few such mobility mechanisms that satisfy all these conditions well. Here we introduce Omnidirectional Balancing Unicycle Robot (OmBURo), a novel unicycle robot with active omnidirectional wheel. The effect is that the unicycle robot can drive in both longitudinal and lateral directions simultaneously. Thus, it can dynamically balance itself based on the principle of dual-axis wheeled inverted pendulum. This letter discloses the early development of this novel unicycle robot involving the overall design, modeling, and control, as well as presents some preliminary results including station keeping and path following. With its very compact structure and agile mobility, it might be the ideal locomotion mechanism for robots to be used in human environments in the future.