Design and control of omni-directional mobile robot for Mobile Haptic Interface

A mobile haptic interface (MHI) refers to a system where a grounded force-feedback haptic interface is mounted onto a mobile robot to provide the user with unlimited workspace, especially for large virtual environments. In MHI, the mobile base needs to quickly change the movement direction, thus a omni-directional robot is preferred. In this paper, we present a novel omni-directional mobile robot designed for a mobile haptic interface (MHI), which uses four custom-made Mecanum wheels to provide higher operation stability. We also implemented two PI control methods (the conventional independent motor control and one combined with the Cartesian velocity control) and empirically evaluated their performance through an experiment. The experimental results indicated that the developed holonomic mobile robot allows accurate velocity control required for the MHI.