Design, fabrication and 3-DOF control of legless capsule robot

TL;DR

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and 3-DOF control of a legless capsule robot capable of navigating viscous environments, utilizing sensor fusion and state feedback control, with experimental validation of its performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel legless capsule robot design with integrated control algorithms and sensor fusion for precise navigation in viscous environments.

Findings

Successful robot movement in viscous fluids demonstrated

Effective position and orientation estimation using sensor fusion

Control algorithms achieve stable and accurate navigation

Abstract

In this paper, a legless capsule robot (capsubot) comprised of a sealed external body, an internal body, and a rotational actuator is proposed. The aim of this robot is to move in a two-dimensional viscous environment. After the robot is designed and modeled, a four-stage angular velocity profile is proposed to move the robot in one direction. In addition, a camera is used to obtain the position of the robot in the environment while the orientation and the velocity of the robot is estimated with Kalman filter by fusing the IMU, gyro, and the magnetometer sensors. Furthermore, to control the robot a state feedback control is implemented. Finally, experimental results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the robots and the proposed algorithms.