Posted in: SERVO Blog (10/16 at 03:02 PM)
Spherical Robot
Spherical robots are nifty designs, and they have several advantages over their wheeled counterparts: they adapt well to all kids of terrain (even water) and are completely sealed, making them ideal for planetary exploration. The big sticking point (as it were) of spherical robots is that they tend to get hung up on obstacles.
They move by changing their center of gravity, but they can’t shift their internal mass outside of their own diameter, which means that they have a finite amount of leverage to play with and therefore can’t get themselves over obstacles of a given height, no matter how much power their motors might output.
[Source] BotJunkie