The paper deals with dynamics and control of a special type of mobile robot designed to act as a small platform to carry sensing devices or actuators in an environment where stability of the platform is critical, like in surveying unstructured hostile industrial environment or exploring other planets, or simply being a part of a human place, like office or home, which has not been designed for mobile machines. The spherical construction offers extraordinary motion properties in cases where turning over or falling down are risks for the robot to continue its motion. Also it has full capability to recover from collisions with obstacles or another robots traveling in the environment.
Societies are formed as collaborative structures to execute tasks which are not possible or are difficult for individuals alone. There are many type of biological societies, but societies formed by machines or robots are still rare. The concept offers, however, interesting possibilities especially in applications where a long term fully autonomous operation is needed and/or the work to be done can be executed in a parallel way by a group of individuals. The paper introduces the basic control and communication structures of robot societies by using a model society. Also a mini-scaled mobile robot which is under construction to be multiplied for the corresponding physical society demonstrator is introduced. Simulation results illustrating the behaviour of the model society are given. Possible applications in waste treatment and process monitoring and cleaning are considered.
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