Development of a novel switchable omnidirectional wheel for performing cooperative tasks using differential drive mobile robots

Abstract

Applying differential drive robots to cooperative systems introduces difficulties regarding the maneuverability of the cooperative system. These difficulties are caused by the sliding constraint of the plain wheels typically used by differential drive robots and mainly affects the turning capability of the cooperative system. This can be a problem when a cooperative system traverses narrow spaces or manipulates large objects. Conversely, differential drive robots are simple to design and control for single robot tasks. To enable differential drive robots to participate in multi-robot cooperative systems, a novel wheel capable of switching between plain and omni-wheel modes is proposed. By selecting the appropriate mode, differential drive robots would be able to work in both single and multi-robot tasks seamlessly without adding complex control to the single robot case or degrading the maneuverability of the cooperative system. As an initial step, the kinematic modeling and the prototype of the wheel is presented together with tests using two differential drive robots implemented with the proposed wheel.