Estimation of Motion Capabilities of Mobile Platforms with Three Omni Wheels Based on Discrete Bidirectionality Compliance Analysis

This paper presents a procedure for estimating the motion capabilities of an omnidirectional mobile platform with three omni wheels arbitrarily distributed and oriented. This procedure is based on the analysis of the bidirectionality compliance between the inverse and forward kinematics of a mobile platform for a wide set of discrete motion commands. This procedure has been applied to analyze eleven alternative mobile platform configurations with three omni wheels. The estimation of the omnidirectional motion capabilities of these platforms agrees with state-of-the-art methods while providing new differentiated information on the translational capabilities of each platform. The procedure can be applied in the design stage of new omnidirectional mobile platforms in order to verify the motion capabilities of new designs with omni wheels.