Design, Fabrication, and Kinematic Analysis of a 6 DOF Mobile Wheeled Parallel Robot

Wheeled robots have various applications in industrial, laboratory, art, and filming environments. The choice of wheel and platform type in these robots depends on the motion and the degrees of freedom expected from the robot. With an appropriate choice of the wheel and platform, the degrees of freedom of 3 (known as holonomic robots) can be achieved in which the robot can move in both x and y directions and also rotate about the z axis in the general coordinate system. If the wheeled robot is designed to carry objects, it is necessary to consider a platform on top of the robot for this purpose. In this paper, a 3-DOF Stewart platform is used such that it provides rotation about x and y axes as well as motion in direction of z axis. The goal of this research is to develop a wheeled robot equipped with the 3-DOF Stewart platform to carry objects with ability of orientation control within the path. With integrating these two robots, the resultant robot will have 6 degrees of freedom, three of which are provided by the Stewart platform (α, β, Δz) and the other three are provided by the wheeled platform (Δx, Δy, γ). Therefore, the robot, with 6 degrees of freedom, can be controlled via the six parameters of Δx, Δy, Δz, α, β, γ.