Spherical Environmental Information Collection Robot
A spherical metamorphic robot for monitoring hazardous sites with onboard environmental sensors.
Monitoring petrochemical plants, chemical facilities, and disaster sites needs robots that can move through clutter and keep sending data. This project designed a spherical environmental monitoring robot: a metamorphic shell with telescopic feet that can rotate, roll, and walk with a wide support polygon. Units talk over an ad-hoc network and pack sensor readings for a host computer so a field can be watched in real time.
The mechanical layout placed the controller and sensors inside the sphere and arranged the leg motors around that core. An STM32 drove the legs and computed gait. Accelerometers, temperature and humidity sensors, and gas sensors were wired into the same board for Bluetooth motion commands and telemetry.
