Recently, the use of mobile robots has been expanding not only in logistics, manufacturing, and service industries but also across everyday life, and the importance of their applications continues to grow. As the application domains of mobile robots d...
Recently, the use of mobile robots has been expanding not only in logistics, manufacturing, and service industries but also across everyday life, and the importance of their applications continues to grow. As the application domains of mobile robots diversify, key requirements are increasingly emphasized beyond mere locomotion performance, including the ability to operate under space constraints, structural simplification, ensuring stability, and improving energy efficiency.
The mono-wheel mobile robot, which operates using a single wheel, features a structure in which the overall system is placed inside or integrated with the wheel, providing advantages in spatial efficiency and mechanical simplicity. Unlike conventional four-wheeled robots, mono-wheel robots exhibit inherently unstable dynamics that require dedicated balance control mechanisms during motion.
Balance control techniques for mono-wheel robots can be categorized into two primary approaches: inertial control using flywheels or gyroscopes, and center-of-mass (CoM) shifting control. Although flywheel- and gyroscope-based stabilization can be effective, these methods suffer from drift during long-term operation and incur high costs. Therefore, research on simpler and more economical CoM-shifting–based balance control is required to reduce reliance on gyroscopic mechanisms.
This paper proposes the design of the 2-DoF dual-armed mono-wheel mobile robot and a roll control system based on a static feedforward PID method. The robot shifts its center of mass by adjusting the angles of two mass-loaded arms, enabling not only balance regulation but also maintenance of a desired roll angle.
The robot consists of one DC motor for driving, two servo motors for roll control, an IMU sensor, an encoder sensor, and an embedded controller. Although two servo motors are used, they move dependently; therefore, the system has one attitude-control DoF and one driving DoF, resulting in a total of 2 degrees of freedom.
PID-based control for target linear velocity is applied to driving control, while a static feedforward PID approach is used for roll control. The static feedforward controller regulates the roll angle by analyzing the relationship among the contact point, the overall CoM, and the current and target roll angle, ensuring that the x-coordinate of the CoM coincides with that of the contact point even when the robot is tilted. A PID-based target-roll tracking controller is added to compensate for disturbances.
The proposed roll control algorithm was validated through multi-body dynamics simulation and experimentally verified on a physical prototype. Furthermore, although gravitational and centrifugal moments should theoretically cancel out when driving in a tilted condition—meaning that rotation should not occur—experimental results demonstrated a tendency for the robot to steer toward the direction of tilt.