System design and locomotion of SUPERball, an untethered tensegrity robot

The Spherical Underactuated Planetary Exploration Robot ball (SUPERball) is an ongoing project within NASA Ames Research Center's Intelligent Robotics Group and the Dynamic Tensegrity Robotics Lab (DTRL). The current SUPERball is the first full prototype of this tensegrity robot platform, event...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) pp. 2867 - 2873
Main Authors Sabelhaus, Andrew P., Bruce, Jonathan, Caluwaerts, Ken, Manovi, Pavlo, Firoozi, Roya Fallah, Dobi, Sarah, Agogino, Alice M., SunSpiral, Vytas
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.05.2015
Subjects
Actuators
Brushless DC motors
Power cables
Robots
Sensors
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Summary:The Spherical Underactuated Planetary Exploration Robot ball (SUPERball) is an ongoing project within NASA Ames Research Center's Intelligent Robotics Group and the Dynamic Tensegrity Robotics Lab (DTRL). The current SUPERball is the first full prototype of this tensegrity robot platform, eventually destined for space exploration missions. This work, building on prior published discussions of individual components, presents the fully-constructed robot. Various design improvements are discussed, as well as testing results of the sensors and actuators that illustrate system performance. Basic low-level motor position controls are implemented and validated against sensor data, which show SUPERball to be uniquely suited for highly dynamic state trajectory tracking. Finally, SUPERball is shown in a simple example of locomotion. This implementation of a basic motion primitive shows SUPERball in untethered control.
ISSN:1050-4729
2577-087X
DOI:10.1109/ICRA.2015.7139590