The Mecanum wheel was designed in Sweden in 1975. Using four of these wheels provides omni-directional movement for a vehicle without needing a conventional steering system (Muir & Neumann, 1990; Dickerson & Lapin, 1991; Braunl, 1999; Navy, USA, 2002 and Lunze & Schmid, 2002). The wheel itself consists of a hub carrying a number of free moving rollers angled at 45° about the hub's circumference...

This paper gives a treatment of various aspects related to snake locomotion. A mathematical model and a physical implementation of a modular snake robot are presented. A control strategy is also developed, yielding a general expression for different gait patterns. Two forms of locomotion have been simulated with the mathematical model, and experiments with the physical snake robot have been con...

The paper demonstrates a following robot with omni-directional wheels, which is able to take action to avoid obstacles. The robot design is based on both fuzzy and extension theory. Fuzzy theory was applied to tune the PMW signal of the motor revolution, and correct path deviation issues encountered when the robot is moving. Extension theory was used to build a robot obstacle-avoidance model. V...

In this paper, we propose a method for global localization using an omni-directional camera. A robot position and angle are estimated by correlation coefficient between topological node-map images and input images. Near-node has the largest correlation coefficient in topological map images. The calculated correlation coefficient makes the mixtures of Gaussians density map. The highest value of ...

A vision based navigation system is presented for determining a mobile robot’s position and orientation using panoramic imagery. Omni-directional sensors are useful in obtaining a field of view, permitting objects in the vicinity of a robot to be imaged simultaneously. Recognizing landmarks in a panoramic image from an a priori model of distinct features in an environment allows a robot’s locat...

This paper takes a practitioner’s perspective on advancing bi-directional transparency in human-AI-robot teams (HARTs). Bi-directional is important for HARTs because the better that people and artificially intelligent agents can understand one another’s capabilities, limits, inputs, outputs contexts given task environment; they work as team to accomplish shared goals, interdependent tasks, over...