Electromagnetic Force Balanced Single-Wheel Robot

It is a challenging task to carry on the research concerning the lateral stabilization of Single wheel robot (SWR). The lateral dynamics of earlier flywheel stabilizing SWR is derived to explain the shortcomings of such a mechanism, and the recovery torque proportional to the acceleration and moment of inertia of the flywheel is proved. But as the motor being a speed server system, it is difficult to control its acceleration to actuate the flywheel to provide recovery torque for SWR; and the moment of inertia of the flywheel must be large enough to produce adequate recovery torque, which makes such a system rather cumbersome. We proposed a new mechanism to solve the problem by introducing an electromagnetic force. The proposed mechanism is described briefly, and the dynamic analyses of such a new SWR is given, then the stability analysis is also done. Three-dimensional (3D) multi-body simulation, numerical simulation and physical invented pendulum prototype experiments were conducted to verify the proposed mechanism. The experiment results verified that the proposed mechanism is feasible and have some advantages over the flywheel balanced SWR.