Improvement of Energy Efficiency for an Omnidirectional Mobile Robot with Steerable Omnidirectional Wheels

Since most autonomous mobile robots are powered by a battery, it is important to increase the continuous operating time without recharging. This can be achieved by improving the energy efficiency of a mobile robot, but little research on energy efficiency has been performed. This paper proposes two methods for improving the energy efficiency of an omnidirectional mobile robot.. One method is to realize a continuously variable transmission (CVT) by adopting the mechanism of steerable omnidirectional wheels. The other is the proposed steering algorithm in which wheel arrangement of the mobile robot is continuously adjusted so as to obtain the maximum energy efficiency of the motors during navigation. In addition, new omnidirectional wheels which can be transformed to the conventional wheels depending on the driving conditions are proposed to compensate for less efficient omnidirectional drive mode. Various tests show that motion control of the OMR-SOW works satisfactorily and the proposed steering algorithm for CVT can provide higher energy efficiency than the algorithm using a fixed steering angle. In addition, it is shown that the differential drive mode can give better energy efficiency than the omnidirectional drive mode.