Design and analysis of swarm spherical robot based on machine vision

Abstract

In this paper, a swarm spherical robot based on machine vision is proposed to adapt to the special applications of robots in the fields of land-based safety, navigation, surveillance and exploration, and discusses the spherical robot in terms of mechanism, control principles and positioning, respectively. The spherical robot structure is a telescopic low-degree-of-freedom parallel metamorphic mechanism, which is first analyzed mechanically using a modified Grubler-Kutzbach criterion to determine the degrees of freedom and to analyse the mechanics of key components. Secondly, the swarm robot consists of multiple spherical robots connected by magnetic forces. By designing a relevant path planning scheme to control the sequence of movements of these spherical robots, the movement of the whole swarm in the direction of a specific point can be achieved. Finally, the positioning and wireless control scheme of swarm robot based on machine vision is presented, and the motion principle of swarm robot is briefly introduced.