Spherical robots are an alternative to crawling and wheeling robots for exploring and monitoring rugged fields such as mines, undergrounds, construction fields or agricultural lands.
These robots generally move faster and can not be easily stuck in a random field topography. Additionally, the monitoring equipment is protected into the shield.
However, the spherical robot locomotion was not optimised.
The spherical robot from ETS was designed for Mars cave exploration and designed with the challenging requirement of aerospace industry. The invention consists of a cylindrical differential actuation mechanism that displace the center of mass of a spherical robot. This configuration optimizes the weight of the pendulum, the control of the robot and integrate two identical, scalable DC brushless motors. The shield protects the mechanical components, the instrumentation conveyed to the investigation site and is transparent.
The robot was deployed and tested into a mine and construction fields. The robot was already equipped with a LIDDAR to demonstrate the quality of the emitted signal through the shield.
PCT patent application
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Professor, Department of mechanical engineering
École de technologie supérieure
CONTACT PERSON
Project Director, Business Development
Axelys
sebastien.prince-richard@axelys.ca