In order to transport materials flexibly and smoothly in a tight plant environment, an omni-directional mobile robot based on four Mecanum wheels was designed. The mechanical system of the mobile robot is made up of three separable layers so as to simplify its combination and reorganization. Each modularized wheel was installed on a vertical suspension mechanism, which ensures the moving stability and keeps the distances of four wheels invariable. The control system consists of two-level controllers that implement motion control and multi-sensor data processing, respectively. In order to make the mobile robot navigate in an unknown semi-structured indoor environment, the data from a Kinect visual sensor and four wheel encoders were fused to localize the mobile robot using an extended Kalman filter with specific processing. Finally, the mobile robot was integrated in an intelligent manufacturing system for material conveying. Experimental results show that the omni-directional mobile robot can move stably and autonomously in an indoor environment and in industrial fields.

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To meet the requirements in terms of large workspace, low inertia, and high degree of accuracy, a novel palletizing robot is introduced in this article. Utilizing spatial hybrid cable-actuated serial-parallel structure and parallelogram mechanism, the robot is able to achieve favorable potentials for stiffness, modularity, and reconfigurability. The kinematics and statics of the robot are investigated, and an algorithm is subsequently proposed to calculate the workspace of the limited degree of freedom cable-actuated serial-parallel manipulator. Then the workspace of the robot under different loads is calculated, and the topological properties of the workspace under different loads are compared and analyzed in detail. The results demonstrate that the proposed structure significantly enlarges the workspace and can also complete palletizing tasks effectively.

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