Motion Analysis and Control of Three-Wheeled Omnidirectional Mobile Robot

Omnidirectional mobile robots are holonomic vehicles that can perform translational and rotational motions independently and simultaneously. The paper provides a detailed mathematical analysis of the motion of a three-wheeled omnidirectional mobile robot leading to the kinematics of the robot. The motion of the robot can be divided into three types, pure rotation, linear motion and rotation around a point of a nonzero radius. The paper also addresses the problem of trajectory tracking, where the robot has to track the desired trajectory while tracking the desired orientation; to do so; a fuzzy controller has been designed. A comparison made between the proposed controller and another from the literature showed that the fuzzy controller with a minimal number of fuzzy rules (only four rules) is more efficient and more accurate. Furthermore, the paper proposes a simple approach to solve the kinematic saturation problem, namely that the control outputs must be within the range of the admissible control. A simulation platform was carried out using MATLAB to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.