Mechatronic Design of a Four Wheel Steering Mobile Robot with Fault-Tolerant Odometry Feedback

In this paper, the mechatronics design of a four wheel steered mobile robot is discussed in detail. Mechanical structure and electrical interfaces are presented. Low-level software architecture based on embedded pc-based control is designed that enables the robot to operate its eight independent actuators synchronously. Kinematics models are elaborated, and it is shown that how mechanical structure of the robot affects kinematics and the feedback. Based on kinematics models, a fault tolerant wheel odometry is proposed to make the feedback robust to practical wheel odometry faults during the solution of forward kinematics. Real-time implementation of presented to support the the efficacy of proposed methods.