Development and Control of a Four-Wheel Drive Holonomic Mobile Robot

In this piece of work, we present both the development and control of a four Mecanum wheeled mobile robotic system ensuring precise maneuverability, and satisfactory tracking performance. Particularly, the development involves the design of actuators for each wheel with appropriate encoders and selection of embedded system for multi-actuator control. Likewise, the closed loop path-tracking control strategy is designed by utilizing the identified model of the drive wheel unit as the inner loop and closed-loop inverse kinematic control as the outer loop, involving system sensory feedback. Both simulations and experimentations are performed to ensure zero turning radius and lateral movements (with constant yaw angles) during the system maneuverability in various pre-defined paths. From these results, it is inferred that both the zero turning radius and lateral movement tasks execute a fine performance with a maximum error of 0.025 m and 0.01 m, respectively. Thus, it is confirmed from the test results that our developed four-Mecanum wheeled robotic system will execute satisfactory performance towards the application of mobile robots.