A basic requirement for all mobile robots is a precise, accurate and fast perception of the environment to allow intelligent behavior through interaction with its surrounding. This paper introduces a new method for a reliable, fast and efficient purely omni-directional vision based mobile robot navigation for a closed world environment. The proposed method enables a robot that is driving at a h...

iv List of Tables xiii List of Figures xiv Chapter 1. Contact Sensing and Mobility in Rough and Cluttered Environments 1 1.1 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2 Omni-directional Holonomic Mobile Robot Suited for Contact 6 1.3 Control Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1.3.1 Constrained Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

The number of robots applied to different jobs in our society has steadily increased over the past years. While industrial robots welding and varnishing our cars are quite common these days, the future generation of robots will enter our everyday life. In contrast to industrial robots working in special evacuated areas for security reasons, these mobile service robots will have to move among an...

Omni-directional robots are becoming more and more common in recent robotic applications. They offer improved ease of maneuverability and effectiveness at the expense of increased complexity. Frequent applications include but are not limited to robotic competitions and service robotics. The goal of this work is to find a precise dynamical model in order to predict the robot behavior. Models wer...