Abstract
ODV9 is a newly designed nonholonomic omni-directional vehicle and proposed as an indoor mobile platform.Such a platform is required to move freely in narrow spaces and to travel on bumpy road surfaces in some measure.ODV9 has four wheel modules, with each wheel module incorporating one motor, one brake and one wheel.The coupling of steering and driving, that results in errors and tire slippage, does not occur in ODV9 intrinsically because each wheel module has only one motor.Compared with other ODVs, the advantages of ODV9 are not limited to the simplicity of its mechanism.Benefiting from using a normal type wheel equipped with a tire, ODV9 is capable of moving in various environments.In this paper the mechanism and the various running modes of ODV9 are discussed, and some experimental results are presented to illustrate its effectiveness.
