Performance evaluation of spherical robot for amphibious applications

Aiming at exploration tasks in complex amphibious environments, our previous researches proposed and developed an amphibious spherical robot, and the robot is capable of motion on land and swim in underwater. In this paper, focus on robotic applications on various terrains of amphibious robot, three quadruped gaits and an adaptive control method were designed, implemented and evaluated for our amphibious spherical robot. Firstly, a simplified locomotion model of the amphibious spherical robot was established, and three types of on-land locomotion gait were designed for the robot, then the adopted gait was adaptively adjusted with attitude compensation of robot. And simultaneously, an adaptive control algorithm was designed to control the amphibious spherical robot in underwater environment, which has good robustness and adaptability of disturbances in underwater environment. Finally, some amphibious evaluation experiments on robotic on-land and underwater motion performance indicated that the amphibious spherical robot was capable of moving stably on-land and in underwater environments, which enhanced its mobility and viability.