Motion Planning for Rolling-Based Locomotion

The basic motivation of this paper is to study locomotion on a hemisphere. To understand the problem we resort to a simplified quasi-static model in which the locomotion object is represented by a mass point. In this formulation, the driving principle is based on controlling the position of the center of mass of the object, exploiting non-holonomic rolling constraint to propel the hemisphere. The principle is tested under simulation using two motion planning algorithms. The simulation results show the possibility of steering the looc-motion system to the desired configurations by moving the center of mass through multiple generalized figure eights on the main hemisphere plane.