Vehicle structure and Omni-directionality for higher space efficiency

Vehicle parking in crowded parking lots has become an un-ignorable problem in urban areas. Traditional man-maneuvering parking structures has low space efficiency, and in contrary, the current fully automatic parking frame system has high cost and difficulty in processing the vehicles in parallel. Inspired by the wheeled mobile robot, the paper investigates the relationship between the space efficiency (the ratio of space for parking over the total space for parking and traveling) and the structures of four-wheel robots, both the classical car-like robot and the omni-directional robot, which can be the platforms for vehicle carriers for parking in parallel to reduce the total time requirement and increase the flexibility of parking systems. An omni-directional driving and 4 wheel independent steering (4WIS) platform is designed and developed to demonstrates its advantage of parking in narrow space. For the type of car-like robot, space efficiency is optimized with respect to the rear overhang and the capacity of the parking lot. Omni-directional structure, in contrary, still has a higher space efficiency, and thus is more ideal for the parking platform.