LAUSR

Abstract Spherical mobile robot has compact structure, remarkable stability, and flexible motion, which make it have many advantages over traditional mobile robots when applied in those unmanned environments, such as outer planets. However, spherical mobile robot is a special highly under-actuated nonholonomic system, which cannot be transformed to the classic chained form. At present, there has not been a kinematics-based trajectory tracking controller which could track both the position states and the attitude states of a spherical mobile robot. In this paper, the four-state (two position states and two attitude states) trajectory tracking control of a type of spherical mobile robot driven by a 2-DOF pendulum was studied. A controller based on the shunting model of neurodynamics and the kinematic model was deduced, and its stability was demonstrated with Lyapunov’s direct method. The control priorities of the four states were allocated according to the magnification of each state tracking error in order to firstly ensure the correct tracking of the position states. The outputs (motor speeds) of the controller were regulated according to the maximum speeds and the maximum accelerations of the actuation motors in order to solve the speed jump problem caused by initial state errors, and continuous and bounded outputs were obtained. The effectiveness including the anti-interference ability of the proposed trajectory tracking controller was verified through MATLAB simulations.