Research/ PLANETARY ROBOTICS
System design and locomotion of SUPERball, an untethered tensegrity robot
Andrew P. Sabelhaus, Jonathan Bruce, Ken Caluwaerts, Pavlo Manovi, Roya Firoozi, Sarah Dobi, Alice Merner Agogino, Vytas SunSpiral
Surface Mobility & TerramechanicsOpenAlex topic: Robotic Locomotion and Control · Design, Mechanisms & HardwareOpenAlex topic: Soft Robotics and Applications
OpenAlexSoft Robotics and Applications · Robotic Locomotion and Control · Structural Analysis and OptimizationNTRSMechanical Engineering · Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
The Spherical Underactuated Planetary Exploration Robot ball (SUPERball) is an ongoing project within NASA Ames Research Center's Intelligent Robotics Group and the Dynamic Tensegrity Robotics Lab (DTRL). The current SUPERball is the first full prototype of this tensegrity robot platform, eventually destined for space exploration missions. This work, building on prior published discussions of individual components, presents the fully-constructed robot. Various design improvements are discussed, as well as testing results of the sensors and actuators that illustrate system performance. Basic low-level motor position controls are implemented and validated against sensor data, which show SUPERball to be uniquely suited for highly dynamic state trajectory tracking. Finally, SUPERball is shown in a simple example of locomotion. This implementation of a basic motion primitive shows SUPERball in untethered control.