Applications of wheeled mobile robots have recently extended to service robots for the handicapped or the aged and industrial mobile robots working in various environments. The most popular wheeled mobile robots are equipped with two independent driving wheels. Since these robots possess 2 degrees-of-freedom (DOFs), they can rotate about any point, but cannot perform holonomic motion including ...

Localization of mobile robots are important tasks for developing autonomous mobile robots. This paper proposes a method to estimate positions of a mobile robot using a omnidirectional camera on the robot. Landmarks for points of references are set up on a field where the robot works. The omnidirectional camera which can obtain 360 [deg] around images takes photographs of these landmarks. The po...

ABSTRACT In this paper, a nonlinear controller is designed for a wheeled mobile robot with three omnidirectional wheels. The omnidirectional wheel has an advantage of universal moving directions on a flat surface without changing its pose. The dynamics of the omnidirectional wheel includes rolling and slipping. Three configurations of mobile robots and an input-additive perturbation are conside...

This paper proposes a self-position estimate algorithm for the multiple mobile robots; each robot uses two omnidirectional cameras and an accelerometer. In recent years, the Great East Japan Earthquake and large-scale disasters have occurred frequently in Japan. From this, development of the searching robot which supports the rescue team to perform a relief activity at a large-scale disaster is...

Omnidirectional robots can move in all directions without steering their wheels and it can rotate clockwise and counterclockwise with reference to their axis. In this paper, we focused only on front and back movement, to analyse the square- and triangle-structured omnidirectional robot movements. An omnidirectional mobile robot shows different performances with the different number of wheels an...

This dissertation describes the work done by the author in the period of his Ph.D. in the field of omnidirectional vision. After a general presentation on omnidirectional vision, the dissertation focuses on omnidirectional vision for mobile robotics. Each chapter of the dissertation covers a different topic in omnidirectional vision for mobile robotics. The three main chapters describe the evol...

CONTACT Dr.-Ing. Dipl. Inform. Hartmut Surmann Schloss Birlinghoven, 53757 Sankt Augustin, Tel 02241/142518 Fax 02241/144-2518 email: [email protected] REFERENCES [1] Surmann, H.: The VolksBot, http://www.VolksBot.de, Oct. 2008 [2] Murphy, R.: Trial by fire [rescue robots]. Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE 11 (3) (Sept. 2004) 50–61 [3] Durrant-Whyte, H., Bailey, T.: Simulta...

We consider the problem of having a team of nonholonomic mobile robots follow a desired leader-follower formation using omnidirectional vision. By specifying the desired formation in the image plane, we translate the control problem into a separate visual servoing task for each follower. We use a rank constraint on the omnidirectional optical flows across multiple frames to estimate the positio...

An omnidirectional mobile robot is able, kinematically, to move in any direction regardless of current pose. To date, nearly all designs and analyses of omnidirectional mobile robots have considered the case of motion on flat, smooth terrain. In this paper, an investigation of the design and control of an omnidirectional mobile robot for use in rough terrain is presented. Kinematic and geometri...