<p>Mobile robots and autonomous guided vehicles have become an indispensable part of modern industrial environments<br>
and are used for a wide range of handling operations. To fully use the potential of mobile platforms, omnidirectional platforms are a good choice. A prominent and widely used variant in the industry are Mecanum wheels, which allow arbitrary movement<br>
in any direction in the plane. In most applications only the kinematics are considered, however, dynamic models that take the structure of the rolls into account are still missing. In this paper two models for Mecanum wheels with different degrees of detail are derived. The detailed model takes the rolls as single bodies undergoing contact and friction with the rolling plane into account. As the wheel consists of multiple rolls a complex contact situation with temporal overlapping and additional vibrations occur. The simplified model reproduces the effect of the rolls with orthotropic friction and only one rigid body for the wheel, thereby being computationally more efficient. Both models are well suited to reproduce essential dynamic effects of a mobile robotic platform, which can not be described by the conventional kinematics model. We implement and compare both models with experimental results, showing the good performance of both models.</p>

An Improved Dynamic Model of the Mecanum Wheel for Multibody Simulations

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2021)

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