The kinematic design of a 3-DOF isotropic mobile robot

Automatic guided vehicles with omnidirectional wheels have three degrees of freedom (DOF). Their full mobility is obtained by virtue of the free rollers around the periphery of the wheels. The choice of the orientation of the roller axes with respect to the wheel axis, along the wheel orientations with respect to the platform, the number of wheels, etc., are considered. A design approach based on the isotropy of the underlying Jacobian matrices is reported.<<ETX>>