Majid Taheri Andani - Center for Mechatronics and Automation, School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
M.J Mahjoob - Center for Mechatronics and Automation, School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
Moosa Ayati - Advanced Instrumentation Lab, School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Due to their complicated kinematics, spherical robots cannot be efficiently controlled by typical control techniques, such as PID controllers. The trajectory tracking and the position control of spherical robots have been the main class of control issuses. To address this difficulty, two controllers are introduced to provide the effective path following of a 2-DOF (Degrees of Freedom) spherical robot. A sliding mode controller and a fuzzy sliding mode controller are designed and compared. The stability of the controllers is examined using the Lyapunov stability theorem. Comparing with conventional controllers, the proposed controllers provide relatively smaller tracking errors. The simulation results indicate that the spherical robot controlled by the proposed methods is capable of moving to a desired point from any given initial point with minimum tracking error.

spherical mobile robot; sliding mode control; fuzzy sliding mode control;