Kinematics Modeling and Simulation of Holonomic Wheeled Mobile Robot with Mecanum Wheels

The wheeled mobile robot WMR has been considered as a planner mechanism with linear and angular movement over a horizontal plane. In particular, the movement of WMR is assumed resulting by pure rolling of wheels without slipping. In this paper inverse and forward kinematics models for a wheeled mobile robot have been obtained. The WMR type proposed in this approach is a holonomic mobile robot with three mecanum wheels. It is known in literature, that there are many types of wheels are used in robots design but we prefer mecanum wheels to used in this study because this type of wheels makes the mobile robot movement in lateral and longitudinal directions smooth and improve the tracking ability to travel in every direction under any orientation.. The kinematic modeling technique has been examined by simulation examples presented in this paper. The first example is to evaluate the angular velocities of the wheels of the robot resulting by input linear and angular velocities of the WMR. The second example is to evaluate the linear and angular velocities of the WMR resulting by input angular velocities of the wheels of the robot.