TABLE OF CONTENTS Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMRs) have been an active area of research and development over the past three decades. This long-term interest has been mainly fueled by the myriad of practical applications that can be uniquely addressed by mobile robots due to their ability to work in large (potentially unstructured and hazardous) domains.
WMRs are increasingly present in industrial and service robotics, particularly when flexible motion capabilities are required on reasonably smooth grounds and surfaces. Several mobility configurations (wheel number and type, their location and actuation, single- or multibody vehicle structure) can be found in the applications.
Mobile robots have quite simple mathematical models to describe their instantaneous motion capabilities; especially compared to serial, parallel, and humanoid robots. However, this only holds for single mobile robots only, because the modeling does become complex as soon as one begins to add trailers to mobile robots. Airport luggage carts are good examples of such mobile robot trains.
The wheeled mobile robots can have a large number of possible wheel configurations and kinematic designs. Each type of configuration has its merits and demerits with respect to the application. The following is the classification of WMRs according to their wheel geometry.
On the CD Differential drive configuration is the most common wheeled mobile robot configuration. It is used because of its simplicity and versatility. It is the easiest to implement and to control. A differentially driven...
