Food

Controlling Omni-directional Wheels of a MSL RoboCup Autonomous Mobile Robot

Fernando Ribeiro, Ivo Moutinho, Pedro Silva, Carlos Fraga, Nino Pereira

Grupo de Automação e Robótica, Departamento de Electrónica Industrial, Universidade do Minho, Campus de Azurém, 4800 Guimarães, Portugal fernando.ribeiro@dei.uminho.pt, ivo@aeiou.pt, pedro_silva@portugalmail.com, CarlosFraga@portugalmail.com, ninopereira@clix.pt

Abstract. Autonomous Mobile Locomotion is of extreme importance in RoboCup robots. Even though in 2050 the robotic team will very likely use legs rather than wheels, at the moment all teams on middle size league use wheels to overcome other problems first. Most teams are using two driving wheels (with one or two cast wheels), four driving wheels and even three driving wheels. The Minho team has been using two driving wheels for the last 5 years (with two caster wheels), but for reaction speed optimization purposes a new approach of three wheels is being developed. This paper deals with the description of such platform, it describes the advantages and also the type of control used.

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Introduction

RoboCup is a scientific challenge created to foster research and development in fields like mobile and autonomous robotics, automation, electronics, computer vision and image processing, as well as other related areas. It consists of a football and/or rescue competition with several different leagues. For those unfamiliar with the RoboCup event, they can read the objectives and games rules on [1]. Although many teams prefer to buy a standard off the shelf robotic platform and implement some changes in hardware/software or even some adaptations, Minho team which has been participating on RoboCup since 1999, builds its own platforms from scratch. Being part of an Industrial Electronics department they build the mechanics, the hardware and the software, bearing in mind that the budget is extremely low. This continuous participation in RoboCup has led to many...