Speed and Balancing Control for Unicycle Robot

Unicycle mobile robot is wheeled mobile robot that can stand and move around using one wheel. It has attached a lot of researchers to conduct studies about the system, particularly in the design of the system mechanisms and the control strategies. Unlike two wheel balancing mobile robot which mechanically stable on one side, unicycle mobile robot requires additional mechanisms to keep balancing robot on all sides. By assuming that both roll dynamics and pitch dynamics are decoupled, so the balancing mechanisms can be designed separately. The reaction wheel is used for obtaining balancing on the roll angle by rotating the disc to generate momentum. While the wheeled robot is used for obtaining balancing on the pitch angle by rotating wheel to move forward or backward. A PID controller is used as balancing control which will control the rotation motor on the reaction disc and wheel based on the pitch and roll feedback from the sensor. By adding the speed controller to the pitch control, the system will compensate automatically for perfectly center of gravity on the robot. Finally, the unicycle robot will be able to balance on pitch angle and roll angle. Based on simulation result validates that robot can balance using PID controller, while based on balancing pitch experiment result, robot can achieve balancing with maximum inclination about +/- 23 degree on pitch angle and +/- 3.5 degree on roll angle with steady state error 0.1 degree.