Estimation of the instantaneous centre of rotation with nonholonomic omnidirectional mobile robots

Abstract In order to move safely and accurately, mobile platforms using steerable wheels require adequate coordination of their actuators. One possibility to achieve actuator coordination is to control the motion of the chassis’ instantaneous centre of rotation (ICR) and motion around it. Considering the chassis as a rigid body, the ICR is located at the intersection of each wheel’s zero motion axis. In practice however, these axes may not concur, in particular when compliant actuators are used for wheel steering. They then no more define precisely an ICR and only an estimation of its position can be computed. Moreover, most parametrizations of the ICR position bring in singularities with no physical meaning, which hinder estimation. This paper introduces the H representation, a new parametrization of the motion state space free of any non-structural singularities, and presents an algorithm which estimates the ICR within the joint space. The proposed approach is compared in terms of reliability, efficiency, accuracy and robustness with three methods working within the operational space. Results suggest that the proposed estimation approach provides the best compromise for these performance indicators.