Possible improvement of the operation of vehicles driven by omnidirectional wheels

Special Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) equipped with at least three omnidirectional wheels may be very useful tools in industrial applications because -in contrast to the Ackerman engines- their position and orientation with respect to the plane of operation can simultaneously be prescribed. So they have the ability for smart and precise navigation in a crowded environment. In the present constructions each wheel can move in arbitrary direction but cannot exert contact force in arbitrary direction in the plane since normally only the big wheels have driving system. The small ones can roll like the wheels of the roller-skates. It will be shown via numerical simulations that this solution requires considerable power consumption since in the turning/rotating phase of the motion the wheels have to work ldquoagainst each otherrdquo. To improve this situation a simple solution is outlined that could make it possible to realize coordinated driving of the small wheels, too. Via simulations it is pointed out that simultaneous driving of the big and small wheels could considerably reduce the power consumption of such devices that is a significant factor if the vehicles have to carry their power sources of limited capacity, too. In the simulations the effects of imprecise model parameters are compensated by simple adaptive fixed point transformations developed at Budapest Tech.