Energy-saving control of rolling speed for spherical robot based on regenerative damping

A spherical robot with a suspended pendulum is a typical nonlinear system. It is of great significance to save movement energy consumption in improving the endurance when the robot performs a detection task. First, the dynamic model of the spherical robot is established to analyze the nonlinear fluctuation characteristics of the rolling speed. On this basis, an active and passive parallel dual-drive strategy is proposed. The control equation of regenerative damping is derived, and the fluctuation and energy characteristics of the system about regenerative damping are further obtained. Then, a feedback controller is designed to control the rolling of the spherical robot based on the optimized method. The influence of different regenerative damping parameters on the control performance is analyzed, and the programmable section of regenerative damping is obtained. The variable discrete points of regenerative damping are optimized by the particle swarm algorithm. The optimal regenerative damping curve is planned by the interpolation function, which makes the rolling control of the spherical robot have a better energy-saving effect. The simulation experiment proved that the proposed active and passive parallel dual-drive strategy and particle swarm optimization control method can comprehensively reduce energy consumption by 44%, which can greatly improve the endurance of the spherical robot.