Motion Control of an Internally-Actuated Cubical Robot Balancing on Its Edge

The Internally-Actuated robots have recently gained popularity due to their ability of achieving controlled mobility (via moving or spinning internal inertial elements) even in milli/ micro gravity environment. In this paper such an internally actuated robot, cubical in shape, is considered and the dynamical equation of the robot is obtained. Aiming to achieve features like controlled tumbling and balancing on the edges, which are necessary for such robots to effectively execute their popular applications such as exploration of smaller solar-system bodies and self assembly of group robots, a stabilizing controller is proposed. The performance and robustness results of the proposed controller are also presented. The comparison results obtained, indicate the superiority of the proposed controller over the ones available in the literature.