Kinematics and dynamics of an omnidirectional mobile platform with powered caster wheels

Abstract Mobile robots with omni-directional motion capabilities are very useful especially in mobile manipulation tasks and tasks in human environment. In this paper, we present the kinematics and dynamics of one class of omni-directional mobile robots that is driven by a 2 axis powered caster wheels with non-intersecting axes of motions (caster wheels with offset). Our derivation approach treats the each caster wheel as a serial manipulator and the entire system as a parallel manipulator generated by several serial manipulator with a common end-effector, following the operational space formulation by Khatib