A Spherical Visually-Guided Robot

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 Dragon Ball, a visually tele-operated spherical robot. The Dragon Ball 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.