Evaluation of wheel mechanisms for omnidirectional robot undercarriages

Abstract:
Mobile robots working in the household, but also as co-workers in industrial environments, e.g. on assembly lines, usually have to operate in areas that are designed for human space requirements and that are typically narrow and unstructured. As a consequence, such robots will in many cases require an omnidirectional undercarriage which allows them to move in arbitrary directions while adjusting their orientation independently from translation. In the last decades, a large number of such undercarriages have been developed which use different wheel mechanisms that all have individual strengths and weaknesses. In order to help designers to choose an appropriate wheel design, common omnidirectional wheel mechanisms are evaluated with respect to two application scenarios and environments: Application of a singleunit mobile robot in a household and application of a small series of mobile robots in an industrial environment.