THE DESIGN OF KINEMATICALLY ISOTROPIC ROLLING ROBOTS WITH OMNIDIRECTIONAL WHEELS

Rolling robots with omnidirectional wheels (ODW), and hence, three deg rees of freedom, are the subject of this paper. We focus on one kind o f ODW, namely, those consisting of a hub with rollers on its periphery , but the main ideas discussed here are readily portable to other kind s. The full mobility of these robots is due to the free rollers. The c hoice of the orientation of the roller axes with respect to the hub ax is, along with the hub orientations with respect to the platform, the number of wheels etc., playing an important role in the operation of t he robot, are design issues considered here. A design criterion based on the isotropy of the underlying Jacobian matrices is reported in thi s paper. Various designs are produced that meet this criterion.