Control Systems in Omni-directional Robotic Vehicle with Mecanum Wheels

Mobile robotic systems are mechatronic devices that are currently becoming more and more complex. To design such a system, a combination of expertise from the fields of mechanical, electrical and computer engineering is required. This paper describes our custom omni-directional robotic platform designed for both indoor and outdoor use that contains a lot of prototypic hardware. All the designed components are interesting as they permit control of the robot as a complex mechatronic system. The main objective here was to use a larger amount of smaller control subsystems, rather than a central one. This is more advantageous from the control point of view. The electronics of the robot consists of microcontroller controlled distributed subsystems that are able to communicate with the master system. The following sections offer an insight into the control structures of the mobile robot.