In order to transport materials flexibly and smoothly in a tight plant environment,\nan omni-directional mobile robot based on four Mecanum wheels was designed. The mechanical\nsystem of the mobile robot is made up of three separable layers so as to simplify its combination and\nreorganization. Each modularized wheel was installed on a vertical suspension mechanism, which\nensures the moving stability and keeps the distances of four wheels invariable. The control system\nconsists of two-level controllers that implement motion control and multi-sensor data processing,\nrespectively. In order to make the mobile robot navigate in an unknown semi-structured indoor\nenvironment, the data from a Kinect visual sensor and four wheel encoders were fused to localize the\nmobile robot using an extended Kalman filter with specific processing. Finally, the mobile robot was\nintegrated in an intelligent manufacturing system for material conveying. Experimental results show\nthat the omni-directional mobile robot can move stably and autonomously in an indoor environment\nand in industrial fields.
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