• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.40-44
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• 2013

The ball-shaped mobile robot, so called ballbot has single point contact on ground and low energy consumption in motion because of the reduced friction. In this paper, a new ballbot is presented, which has omnidirectional mobile platform inside of it as a driving system. Thus the ballbat has omnidirectional mobility without nonholonomic constraints. Kinematics and inverse kinematics of the ballbat is derived also in this paper.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.1145-1151
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• 2013

Kinematic modeling is a prerequisite for motion planning and the control of mobile robots. In this paper, we proposed a new method of kinematic modeling for a type of mobile robot based on differential motion transformation. The differential motion implies a small translation and rotation in three-dimensional space in a small time interval. Thus, transformation of the differential motion gives the velocity relationship, i.e., Jacobian between two coordinate frames. Since the theory of the differential motion transformation is well-developed, it is useful for the systematic velocity kinematic modeling of mobile robots. In order to show the validity for application of the differential motion transformation, we obtained velocity kinematic models for a type of exemplar mobile robot including spherical ballbots.