Kinematic Analysis and Motion Planning for a Planar Multiarticulated Omnidirectional Mobile Robot

In this paper, kinematic modeling and singularity analysis are performed for an omnidirectional mobile robot. At the beginning, generalized formulas of the mobility and the first-order kinematics for a planar multiarticulated omnidirectional mobile robot are proposed. To verify the proposed formulas, a mobile robot that consists of three wheel mechanisms each of which has one redundant joint as compared to the operational degrees is introduced. Initially, the kinematic modeling and dynamic analysis, and odometry calculation for this robot are conducted. Next, singularity analysis of the proposed robot is performed. Then, using such a kinematic redundancy of each chain, motion planning algorithms that exploit the kinematic redundancy of the wheel chain are suggested. For navigation, a localization algorithm of the mobile robot based on odometry is presented, and specifically, two-leveled obstacle avoidance scheme, which simultaneously considers both large and small obstacles, is proposed. The usefulness of the proposed algorithms is verified through experimentation.This work was supported by the Technology Innovation Program (10040097) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy Republic of Korea (MOTIE, Korea), supported by Mid-career Researcher Program through a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) (NRF-2013R1A2A2A01068814), and supported by the Technology Innovation Program (10049789, Steering and driving mechanism for Cardio-vascular intervention procedure) funded by MOTIE, Korea. The work performed by ICT based Medical Robotic Systems Team of Hanyang University, Department of Electronic Systems Engineering was supported by the BK21 Plus Program funded by NRF