Design and Construction of the DragonBall

Abstract

Spherical robots provide a number of advantages over their wheeled counterparts, but they also presents a number of challenges and complexities. Chief among these are issues related to locomotive strategies and sensor placement and processing given the rolling nature of the device. Here we describe DragonBall, a visually tele-operated spherical robot. The DragonBall utilizes a combination of a geared wheel to move the center of mass of the vehicle coupled with a torque wheel to change direction. Wide angled cameras mounted on the robot’s horizontal axis provide a 360 view of the space around the robot and are used to simulate a traditional pan tilt zoom camera mounted on the vehicle for visual tele-operation. The resulting vehicle is well suited for deployment in contaminated environments for which vehicle remediation is a key operational requirement.