Designing Omni-Directional Mobile Robot Platform for Research

Machines, as a key workforce in manufacturing, mining, construction, are essential for industry, and socially. However, existing mobile robots’ designs do not provide enough mobility and maneuverability. This is one of the major factors that requires an improved design of mobile robot platform.
This thesis is focused on designing an improved Omni-directional robot platform that has good mobility and maneuverability. To realize these conditions, a lot of criteria and constraints need to be considered in the design process. The conceptual design flows of this mobile robot are to satisfy the need of a mobile robot platform, establish Omni-directional mobile robot specifications followed by concept generation and concept selection.
A full decomposition of Omni-directional mobile robot was done. This was followed by building a morphology chart to gather several ideas for those sub-functions of mobile robot. Combination of different types of sub-functions will generate several new Omni-directional mobile robot concepts. The concepts were drafted by using Three-dimensional (3-D) Computer Aided Designing SOLIDWORKS software. After concept generation, the concepts were evaluated by using weighted decision matrix method. The best concept was generated from 3-D design to get 2-D technical drawing and kinematics analysis. These analysis and results of the robot performance are presented in this thesis