Complete Identification of Isotropic Configurations of a Caster Wheeled Mobile Robot with Nonredundant/Redundant Actuation

In this paper, we present a complete isotropy analysis of a caster wheeled omnidirectional mobile robot(COMR) with nonredundant/redundant actuation. The motivation of this work is that the omnidirectional mobility loses significance in motion control unless the isotropy characteristics is maintained well. First, with the characteristic length introduced, the kinematic model of a COMR is obtained based on the orthogonal decomposition of the wheel velocities. Second, a general form of the isotropy conditions of a COMR is given in terms of physically meaningful vector quantities which describe the wheel configurations. Third, for all possible nonredundant and redundant actuation sets, the algebraic expressions of the isotropy conditions are derived to completely identify the isotropic configurations of a COMR. Fourth, the number of the isotropic configurations and the characteristic length required for the isotropy are discussed.