The Wheelbot: A jumping reaction wheel unicycle

Combining off-the-shelf components with 3D-printing, the Wheelbot is a symmetric reaction wheel unicycle that can jump onto its wheels from any initial position. With non-holonomic and under-actuated dynamics, as well as two coupled unstable degrees of freedom, the Wheelbot provides a challenging platform for nonlinear and data-driven control research.

This work will be presented at IROS 2022 and is part of the article "The Wheelbot: A jumping reaction wheel unicycle", published in the robotics and automation letters (RA-L): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/...

Researchers:
A. René Geist, Jonathan Fiene, Naomi Tashiro, Zheng Jia, Sebastian Trimpe

This work was done at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart as well as RWTH Aachen University and is being supported in part by the Max Planck Society and the Cyber Valley initiative. A. René Geist was supported by the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS): https://imprs.is.mpg.de/

Wheelbot project page: https://sites.google.com/view/wheelbot
YouTube Channel of the DSME:    / @datascienceinmechanicaleng8055  
DSME homepage: https://www.dsme.rwth-aachen.de
MPI-IS Robotics homepage: https://is.mpg.de/en/robotics