Kinematic modeling, mobility analysis and design of wheeled mobile robots

Wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) consist of interconnections of many electromechanical systems. Their mechanical subsystem comprises primarily the platform and the wheel units. To formulate the kinematic model of this class of robots, we model the individual subsystems separately. The composite kinematic model of a WMR is then a coupling of the various kinematic submodels. We study WMRs with different wheels, i.e. offset wheels, centered wheels and dual-wheels. The study focuses on system mobility, which is derived using the functional matrix. We also identified the kinematic equivalence between the dual-wheel and the centered wheels, and some advantages of the dual-wheels over the centered wheels and offset wheels. Results suggest that WMRs with mobility less than 3 cannot track a trajectory with a discontinuous heading without incorporating a time delay, during which the wheel orientation should be changed. Moreover, the steering angles of WMRs equipped with steered wheels require proper coordination to avoid jamming of the drive subsystem. For design purposes, we aim at a kinetostatically robust WMR. The concept of kinetostatic isotropy is applied to find the location of the wheels with respect to the platform and their type in order to achieve isotropy. It is shown that WMRs with three conventional wheels can be made isotropic if the offset either vanishes or equals the radius of the wheel, and if the three wheels are mounted at the vertices of an equilateral triangle.