Design and Evaluation of Two Spherical Systems for Mobile 3D Mapping

Spherical robots offer unique advantages for mapping applications in hazardous or confined environments, thanks to their protective shells and omnidirectional mobility. This work presents two complementary spherical mapping systems: a lightweight, non-actuated design and an actuated variant featuring internal pendulum-driven locomotion. Both systems are equipped with a Livox Mid-360 solid-state LiDAR sensor and run LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO) algorithms on resource-constrained hardware. We assess the mapping accuracy of these systems by comparing the resulting 3D point-clouds from the LIO algorithms to a ground truth map. The results indicate that the performance of state-of-the-art LIO algorithms deteriorates due to the high dynamic movement introduced by the spherical locomotion, leading to globally inconsistent maps and sometimes unrecoverable drift.