Navigation System for Omni-directional Automatic Guided Vehicle with Mecanum Wheel

This paper presents navigation system for an omni-directional AGV (automatic guided vehicle) with Mecanum wheels. The Mecanum wheel, one design for the wheel which can move in any direction, is a conventional wheel with a series of rollers attached to its circumference. The localization techniques for the general mobile robot use basically encoder. Otherwise, they use gyro and electronic compass with encoder. However, it is difficult to use the encoder because in the Mecanum wheel the slip occurs frequently by the rollers attached to conventional wheel's circumference. Hence, we propose the localization of the omnidirectional AGV with the Mecanum wheel. The proposed localization uses encoder, gyro, and accelerometer. In this paper, we ourselves designed and made the AGV with the Mecanum wheels for experiment. And we analyzed the accuracy of the localization when the AGV moves sideways a 20m distance at about 20cm/s and 38cm/s, respectively. In experimental result, we verified that the accuracies of the proposed localization are 27.4944mm and 29.2521mm respectively.