Implementation of a Omnidirectional Wheeled Robot Using Planetary-Gear-Type Differential Drive Steering Mechanism

Abstract

This paper presents an implementation of an active-caster type omnidirectional robot using planetary gear as steering mechanism, which distributes two motor input via the sun gear and the internal gear into steering as the carrier motion and wheel-driving output as rotation of a planetary gear on the carrier. The idea cited from previous study is shown first with our additional idea to drive the sun and the internal gear, which makes the caster unit compact. A set of control method of caster unit and whole robot light enough to be implemented on a 16bit microcontroller with fixed-point calculation is provided with experimental demonstration in accompanied video.