2P1-D18 Cooperative Transport using Robots Balanced on Balls

This paper describes application of robots balanced on balls for transport. While balancing on the ball is a kind of performance acted by human or animals, it has good characteristic as transportation device in robot system. The robot balanced on a ball could be realized by two sets of inverted pendulum control and omnidirectional driving mechanism of the ball. It could not only stand still, move, and turn but also behave as it was passive by turning off one control gain. Ideas to use the robot for transport are proposed in this paper. A single robot could transport some loads on the top without changing control parameters. Multiple robots could cooperatively carry large objects with human. Brief introduction of the system, control of passive mode, use for transport, and some of experimental results are described.