The robust design of a novel mobile robot, which comprises two driving wheels and an intermediate body carrying the payload, is the subject of this paper. We prove that, by virtue of the robot architecture, the kinetostatic model of the system is isotropic. Moreover, regarding the robot dynamic response, a robust design problem is formulated by minimizing the design bandwidth of the generalized inertia matrix of the robot over its architecture parameters. Furthermore, design conditions are given for the robot performance in trajectory-tracking to be feasible. Finally, a numerical comparison of two design solutions, one feasible and one robust, is provided by means of simulation runs. We demonstrate that the robust design solution doubles robot performance in trajectory-tracking, while reducing the oscillations of the intermediate body, by 40%, when compared with the feasible solution.

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