Path following of a single wheel robot

Abstract

A single wheel, gyroscopically stabilized robot was developed to provide a dynamic stability for rapid locomotion. It is a sharp-edged wheel actuated by a spinning flywheel for steering and a drive motor for propulsion. The spinning flywheel acts as a gyroscope to stabilize the robot and it can be tilted to achieve steering. In this paper, we present a path following controller for the robot. We first describe the robot motion by a set of configurations using the path curvature. We present a controller for tracking any desired straight line without falling over. For the controller, we first design the linear and steering velocities for driving the robot to the desired straight line through controlling the path curvature. The controller then applies the linear state feedback to stabilize the robot to the predefined lean angle such that the resulting steering velocity of the robot converges to the given steering velocity.