Mechanical Design and Control System of an Omni-directional Mobile Robot for Material Conveying

This paper presents the mechanical design and control system of a material conveying mobile robot. The robot uses a four-wheel driven chassis and has omni-directional mobility. The mechanical system based on four Mecanum wheels is designed with a damping suspension mechanism. A Siemens S7-1217C PLC with extended modules is used as the lower-layer controller, while a laptop computer is used as the upper-layer controller. The control algorithm for the motion modes of the robot is developed, and the motion control performance is tested with a hand box based on its three-axis potentiometer inside. At last, the visual navigation algorithm based on Hough Transform is designed and an experimental confirmation is completed.