Heavy-duty omni-directional Mecanum-wheeled robot for autonomous navigation: System development and simulation realization

A Mecanum-wheeled robot benefits from great omni-direction maneuverability. However it suffers from random slippage and high-speed vibration, which creates electric power safety, uncertain position errors and energy waste problems for heavy-duty tasks. A lack of Mecanum research on heavy-duty autonomous navigation demands a robot platform to conduct experiments in the future. This paper introduces AuckBot, a heavy-duty omni-directional Mecanum robot platform developed at the University of Auckland, including its hardware overview, the control system architecture and the simulation design. In particular the control system, synergistically combining the Beckhoff system as the Controller-PC to serve low-level motion execution and ROS as the Navigation-PC to accomplish highlevel intelligent navigation tasks, is developed. In addition, a computer virtual simulation based on ISG-virtuos for virtual AuckBot has been validated. The present status and future work of AuckBot are described at the end.