Mechanical Design of Cylindrical Track for Sideways Motion

Proceedings of 2008 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automatio

Exploration of robotic-wheel technology for enhanced urban mobility and city scale omni-directional personal transportation

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-52).Mobility is traditionally thought of as freedom to access more goods and services. However, in my view, mobility is also largely about personal freedom, i.e., the ability to exceed one's physical limitations, in essence, to become "more than human" in physical capabilities. This thesis explores novel designs for omni-directional motion in a mobility scooter, car and bus with the aim of increasing personal mobility and freedom. What links these designs is the use of split active caster wheel robot technology. In the first section, societal and technological impacts of omni-directional motion in the city are examined. The second section of the thesis presents built and rendered prototypes of these three designs. The third and final section, evaluates implementation issues including robotic controls and an algorithm necessary for real world omni-directional mobility.by Raul-David Valdivia Poblano.S.M

Designing Omni-Directional Mobile Robot Platform for Research

Machines, as a key workforce in manufacturing, mining, construction, are essential for industry, and socially. However, existing mobile robots’ designs do not provide enough mobility and maneuverability. This is one of the major factors that requires an improved design of mobile robot platform. This thesis is focused on designing an improved Omni-directional robot platform that has good mobility and maneuverability. To realize these conditions, a lot of criteria and constraints need to be considered in the design process. The conceptual design flows of this mobile robot are to satisfy the need of a mobile robot platform, establish Omni-directional mobile robot specifications followed by concept generation and concept selection. A full decomposition of Omni-directional mobile robot was done. This was followed by building a morphology chart to gather several ideas for those sub-functions of mobile robot. Combination of different types of sub-functions will generate several new Omni-directional mobile robot concepts. The concepts were drafted by using Three-dimensional (3-D) Computer Aided Designing SOLIDWORKS software. After concept generation, the concepts were evaluated by using weighted decision matrix method. The best concept was generated from 3-D design to get 2-D technical drawing and kinematics analysis. These analysis and results of the robot performance are presented in this thesi

Human-powered vehicle capable of movement in the longitudinal and lateral directions

Human-powered vehicles, especially conventional wheelchairs, are essential tools for people with lower body disability. But their movement in a lateral direction is limited or impossible, which burdens users who want to change directions, especially in a narrow space. Thus, a human-powered vehicle that can move in a lateral direction is required. To move in any direction, many motor-driven omnidirectional vehicles have been proposed, but humans cannot manually power their mechanisms. To solve this problem, we are developing a human-powered vehicle, that is, driven by hands of the rider, that can move in both the longitudinal and lateral directions. This paper proposes such a vehicle, which has a mechanism to move in the lateral direction like people can do while walking. We designed it so that riders can operate its mechanism by analyzing the space reachable by the rider’s palms where they can effectively exert power. We constructed a prototype and conducted experiments to confirm that the vehicle moves as expected with relatively low effort. In the experiments, we confirmed the validity of vehicle operation by comparing the moving time of the vehicle with and without the lateral translation function for different travel distances and passage widths. Our results showed that the proposed vehicle moves more quickly or requires shorter moving distance in comparison with a conventional wheelchair because of the lateral movement function. In addition, we found that the threshold for utility of the function is whether the passage width is larger than the vehicle diagonal length

Application of Odometry and Dijkstra Algorithm as Navigation and Shortest Path Determination System of Warehouse Mobile Robot

One of the technologies in the industrial world that utilizes robots is the delivery of goods in warehouses, especially in the goods distribution process. This is very useful, especially in terms of resource efficiency and reducing human error. The existing system in this process usually uses the line follower concept on the robot's path with a camera sensor to determine the destination location. If the line and destination are not detected by the sensor or camera, the robot's navigation system will experience an error. it can happen if the sensor is dirty or the track is faded. The aim of this research is to develop a robot navigation system for efficient goods delivery in warehouses by integrating odometry and Dijkstra's algorithm for path planning. Holonomic robot is a robot that moves freely without changing direction to produce motion with high mobility. Dijkstra's algorithm is added to the holonomic robot to obtain the fastest trajectory. by calculating the distance of the node that has not been passed from the initial position, if in the calculation the algorithm finds a shorter distance it will be stored as a new route replacing the previously recorded route. the distance traversed by the djikstra algorithm is 780 mm while a distance of 1100 mm obtains the other routes. The time for using the Djikstra method is proven to be 5.3 seconds faster than the track without the Djikstra method with the same speed. Uneven track terrain can result in a shift in the robot's position so that it can affect the travel data. The conclusion is that odometry and Dijkstra's algorithm as a planning system and finding the shortest path are very efficient for warehouse robots to deliver goods than ordinary line followers without Dijkstra, both in terms of distance and travel time