Extending a spherical robot for dealing with irregular surfaces: a sea urchin-like robot

Abstract

Spherical robots provide an exploration platform that enables the access to inaccessible or dangerous places to people. These robots are also capable of hiding their components inside themselves, protecting in that way their integrity. Even though these robots are capable of moving over irregular surfaces, they face difficulties when moving over surfaces with hollows, stairs, or slopes. We propose a sea urchin-like robot, a spherical robot equipped with retractable devices within its body. This robot overcomes some disadvantages of spherical robots, concerning namely locomotion over irregular surfaces. The robot is capable of moving over irregular surfaces with hollows up to of its diameter, a significant gain to the known constraint of objects and hollows of of their diameter that traditional spherical robots are able to deal with. The main contribution of this work is a model of a flexible vehicle able to traverse irregular surfaces required in remote sensing missions.