Fault-tolerance experiments with a kinematically redundant holonomic mobile robot

Abstract

Indoor locomotion with mobile robots has found applications in industrial part moving, factory floor investigation and cleaning tasks. Holonomic mobile robots have the advantage of moving in tight and winding passages without the need of steering. In this study, a four omni-directional wheeled mobile robot is considered. The mobile robot is kinematically redundant having four of these wheels and this is used in providing fault-tolerance due to a malfunction in one of the wheels. In this paper, the redundancy resolution for this mobile robot is explained providing a solution to a fault in one of the wheels during operation. A top level controller to compensate for the orientation errors is introduced. Finally experimental set-up is presented along with the result of the fault-tolerance experiments.