Design of an omnidirectional and holonomic wheeled platform prototype

The authors present the concepts for a new family of wheeled platforms which feature full omnidirectionality with simultaneous and independent rotational and translational motion capabilities. They first describe the original orthogonal-wheels assembly on which these platforms are based and discuss how a combination of these assemblies is used to generate an omnidirectional capability. The design and control of a prototype platform developed to test and demonstrate the proposed concepts are then described, and experimental results illustrating the full omnidirectionality of the platform with decoupled rotational and translational degrees of freedom are presented