Moball Network: A Self-Powered Intelligent Network of Controllable Spherical Mobile Sensors to Explore Solar Planets and Moons

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel planetary exploration system capable of functioning in most solar planets and moons. The Moball Network is an agile, self-powered, intelligent, and reconfigurable distributed in-situ exploratory system. We compare our proposed system with state of the art planetary exploration systems and concepts and suggest several novel mission architectures specifically for planetary bodies with an atmosphere such as Mars, or those whose surface includes lakes and ice sheets such as Titan or the Earth's northern and southern caps, as well as smaller bodies with no atmosphere such as the Moon or asteroids. We also describe the current development status of the system and the proof of concept for the ideas presented.

Moball: An intelligent wind-opportunistic mobile sensor to monitor the polar regions

“…As the wind rotates the Moball, the magnets pass through the solenoids and the resulting change in magnetic flux through the solenoid generates energy due to Faraday's Law of Induction. [4] The preliminary design of the Moball's rigidized shell structure was reported in [1], [3]. The optimized design of the Moball's linear energy induction system has been prototyped (Fig.…”

On the Optimal Control of a Rolling Ball Robot Actuated by Internal Point Masses

“…Many methods have been proposed (and some realized) to actuate a rolling ball, such as illustrated in Figure 1.3. References [17,18,19] actuate the rolling ball by internal rotors such as shown in Figure 1.3a, while [23,24,25,26,27,22] actuate the rolling ball via 6 internal magnets, each of which slides inside its own linear, solenoidal tube, i.e. a straight tube embedded within a solenoid that generates a magnetic field along the tube's longitudinal axis as illustrated in Figure 1.3b.…”

“…(b) A ball actuated by 6 magnets, each in its own linear, solenoidal tube, studied in [23,24,25,26,27,22].…”

Design investigation of a coreless tubular linear generator for a Moball: A spherical exploration robot with wind-energy harvesting capability

“…In a previous study, Davoodi et al proposed the distributed sensor network which employs a number of wind-driven spherical mobile sensor platforms with wind-energy harvesting capability, referred to as Moballs [2,3]. Each Moball is equipped with three orthogonal tubular linear actuators/generators as shown in Fig.…”