Steerable rolling of a 1-DoF robot using an internal pendulum
Robotics
2025-04-17 v1
Abstract
We present ROCK (Rolling One-motor Controlled rocK), a 1 degree-of-freedom robot consisting of a round shell and an internal pendulum. An uneven shell surface enables steering by using only the movement of the pendulum, allowing for mechanically simple designs that may be feasible to scale to large quantities or small sizes. We train a control policy using reinforcement learning in simulation and deploy it onto the robot to complete a rectangular trajectory.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.11748,
title = {Steerable rolling of a 1-DoF robot using an internal pendulum},
author = {Christopher Y. Xu and Jack Yan and Kathleen Lum and Justin K. Yim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.11748},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
2 pages, submitted to 2nd Unconventional Robots Workshop: Rethinking Robotic Systems Beyond Convention at IEEE ICRA 2025