Obstacle Avoidance of a 3WD Omni-Wheel Mobile Robot in Webots Environment

Abstract

This research focuses on the obstacle avoidance of a three-wheel drive (3WD) omni-wheel mobile robot in Webots simulation environment. Traditionally for objectives-oriented and fast robot competition like Robocon, no robot simulations were conducted at all from majority of the participants especially from Malaysia for their developed mobile robots to find the optimum movement and navigation in the game arena, but instead directly deploy the strategy by trial and error. Consequently, the processes were time-consuming and involved waste of materials and further expenses to physically test each robots. Hence in this research, a 3WD omni-wheel mobile robot with basic components including motors and omni-wheels has been designed in SolidWorks before being imported into Webots. The simulation environment in Webots has been designed in a way that it contains some obstacles in an arena. Programming controllers were created to control the movements of the robot by C++ and physics were applied to both robot and objects. In addition, optical sensors were also placed on the body of the robot to add the ability of obstacles avoidance. The overall simulation results showed promising outcome to be implemented by Robocon participants towards achieving sustainable development process. The developed mobile robot can be successfully controlled to maneuver in omni-directional movement. Optimum movement of the robot can finally be properly strategized by participants before going into the competition.