Kinematic Model of Wheeled Mobile Robots

This paper deals with the structure of the kinematic models of wheeled mobile robots (WMR). A wheeled mobile robot here considered as a planer rigid body that rides on an arbitrary number of wheels. In this paper it is shown that, for a large class of possible configurations of wheels, five types of configurations can be done namely i) fixed standard wheels, ii) steerable standard wheels, iii) castor wheels, iv) Swedish wheels, and v) spherical wheels. These wheels are characterized by generic structures of the model equations. Based on the geometrical constraints of these wheels a kinematical model has been proposed and the degree of mobility, steerability and maneuverability are studied. Finally this analysis is applied to various wheeled mobile robots. Examples are presented to illustrate the models.