Towards a Collaborative Omnidirectional Mobile Robot in a Smart Cyber-Physical Environment

This paper presents current progress in a three-fold research project, focusing on increasing the movement flexibility in smart cyber-physical environments, which are becoming more prevalent with industry 4.0. The objective is to design and develop a new research platform in the form of a highly flexible omnidirectional mobile manipulator with a full kinematics model. The research platform entails an omnidirectional autonomous mobile platform with an integrated collaborative manipulator, making it a single dynamic system. This task is split into three parts: 1) designing and constructing a flexible low cost omnidirectional mobile platform, 2) the addition of a collaborative robot arm to add task execution capabilities, 3) design the 9 DoF model for the system. This paper presents the first step towards the overall goal of collaborative omnidirectional mobile manipulators. The constructed mobile robot was able to generate and navigate an obstacle free path, using sensor data, from an initial pose to a goal pose.