Omniwheel Chassis' Model and Plugin for Gazebo Simulator

摘要

Increasing a mobility of a robot in a limited space or in a presence of a large number of people is an important task.Mecanum wheels could provide the required high flexibility locomotion in any direction.This article presents a virtual model of an omniwheel robot in the Gazebo simulator.Freely rotating rollers were implemented to simulate the robot motion.We developed a four-wheel mecanum mobile robot plugin controls the robot by publishing linear velocity data along X and Y axes, and angular velocity data along Z-axis.The plugin could optionally publish a standard ground-truth odometry of the Gazebo or a calculated in real time wheel odometry.The open source code is extendable for similarly structured platforms and is available for a download via GitLab.