Omni directional mobile robots have been popularly employed in several applications especially in soccer player robots considered in Robocup competitions. However, omni directional navigation system, omni-vision system and omni-kick mechanism in such soccer player robots have not ever been combined. This situation brings the idea of a robot with no head direction into existence, i.e. a comprehe...

Structure From Motion Using Omni-directional Vision and Certainty Grids. (August 2004) Steven Rey Ortiz, B.S., Texas A&M University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna This thesis describes a method to create local maps from an omni-directional vision system (ODVS) mounted on a mobile robot. Range finding is performed by a structure-from-motion method, which recovers the th...

In this paper, we propose SURF feature based approach for mobile robot navigation. In this approach, we capture environmental images by using omni-directional camera and extract features of these images by using SURF. We treat these features as landmarks and estimate robot self-location and direction of motion. SURF features are invariant under scale change and rotation and robust under image n...

The structure of OmniKity-I (OK-I), the miniature omni-directional mobile robot, and its kinematics and dynamics models are presented. OK-I has three DOFs in the plane. A conventional two wheeled mobile robot (2-WMR) serves as the base of OK-I for translational motion. The robot body is on top of the base. The third motor controls angular motion of the body as the base turns according to the tr...

Autonomous navigation of mobile robot requires a ranging system for measurement of distance to environmental objects. It is obvious that the wider and the faster distance measurement gives a mobile robot more freedom in trajectory planning and control. The active omni-directional ranging system proposed in this paper is capable of obtaining the distance for all 3600 directions in real-time beca...

This paper describes a method to construct a stationary environmental map and estimate the ego-motion of a mobile robot from unknown planar motion by using an omni-directional vision sensor. Most environments where mobile robot works are limited to two-dimensional space and the environmental map which is necessary for mobile robot navigation has also two dimensions. However, conventional “Struc...

Despite that omni-directional mobile robots have been employed popularly in several application areas, effort on optimal design of such mobile robots has been few in literature. Thus, this paper investigates the optimal design of omni-directional mobile robots. Particularly, optimal design parameters such as one or double offset distance of wheel mechanism and the wheel radius are identified wi...

Abstract: This paper presents a trajectory controller for an omni-directional mobile robot. The controller presents important features, as the possibility of defining different translation velocities and angular positions to the robot during the trajectory following. The parameters of the controller are optimizated based on trajectory following simulations, with the mobile robot model. Simulati...