Control of the Gyrover: A single-wheel gyroscopically stabilized robot

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 large gyroscope on a tilt mechanism provides for lateral balance and steering 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 optimizes 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 robot prototype.