Deformable Sphere Robot

I see lots of "moving ball robots" here on half-bakery, so I think it's about time to post my own, slightly-different rolling ball robot idea before somebody beats me to it. :)

Spacemoggy's design looks very much like mine: six (or more) nitinol (or motor-contracted) strings inside a hollow, semi-rigid sphere. The difference is that the sphere is deformable and no central weight is required. Instead, the ball rolls because it is squashed in such a way that it will fall over to that side. I think, with enough wires and a smart-enough computer, a natural rolling motion in any direction could be achieved on a flat surface. With the right material for the outer shell, it could scale hills.

Furthermore, this design could also support a bouncing behavior like Ling's wonderfully-elegant Self-Bouncing Ball. But the bouncing behavior could be more complex.

A couple of applications include robotic explorers and toys. There's no reason a simple version of this should be expensive.