Control of the Gyrover: A Single-Wheel Gyroscopically Stabilized Robot

Abstract

The Gyrover is a single wheel gyroscopically stabilized mobile robot developed at Carnegie Mellon University. An internal pendulum serves as a counter weight for a drive motor that causes fore/aft motion, while a tilt-mechanism on a large gyroscope provides a mechanism for lateral actuation. In this paper we develop a detailed dynamic model for the Gyrover and use this model in an extended Kalman filter to estimate the complete state. A linearized version of the model is used to develop a state feedback controller. The design methodology is based on a semi-definite programming procedure which optimize the stability region subject to a set of linear matrix inequalities that capture stability and pole placement constraints. Finally, the controller design combined with the extended Kalman filter are verified on the prototype.