Articulated Wheeled Robots: Exploiting Reconfigurability and Redundancy

Articulated Wheeled Robotic (AWR) locomotion systems consist of chassis connected to a set of wheels through articulated linkages. Such articulated “leg-wheel systems” facilitate reconfigurability that has significant applications in many arenas, but also engender constraints that make the design, analysis and control difficult. We will study this class of systems in the context of design, analysis and control of a novel planar reconfigurable omnidirectional wheeled mobile platform. We first extend a twist based modeling approach to this class of AWRs. Our systematic symbolic implementation allows for rapid formulation of kinematic models for the general class of AWR. Two kinematic control schemes are developed which coordinate the motion of the articulated legs and wheels and resolve redundancy. Simulation results are presented to validate the control algorithm that can move the robot from one configuration to another while following a reference path. The development of two generations of prototypes is also presented briefly.