Today we proudly present our state-of-the-art — Zobov Mecanum Mobile Robot Model 1. It has been invented for International student’s robotic contest Eurobot 2018. The robot’s missions are: supplying drinking water to the city by collecting water balls from the recuperator, sorting them by color and delivering purified water to the water tower or pushing wasted water to the retreatment plant. Powering the home automation panel by pushing its button. Foraging a flower and helping bees to pollinate the flowers. 

The robot performs driving and handling tasks in a fully self-contained manner. It uses whole new algorithms to position itself and to plan its route. The high-level logic of the robot is implemented on an embedded single board computer. It connects via Industrial Ethernet and CAN field-buses to all other devices, such as motion controllers, machine vision system, navigation sensors and custom board for controlling auxiliary parts.

The robot’s software enables robust autonomous navigation of the platform. Our localization and detection engines keep to the minimum any risk of collision and need no artificial markings such as lines or PFID-beacons. The software collects all the data from the scanning laser rangefinders, wheel encoders, ultrasonic beacons and processes it to create a corresponding map of the surrounding.

The mecanum wheel technology allows the vehicle to move in any direction. The wheel consists of two rims and eight free-running rollers, which are mounted at a 45° angle. The wheels move independently, so the robot can move not only forwards and sideways but diagonally and in a circle, as well. The entire wheel is driven by Maxon EC-motor with encoders and Hall sensors. The motor is controlled by closed-loop motion controller and provides +/- 5 mm position tolerance to the platform.

Robots rugged metal-plastic chassis is produced by using additive technologies. Most plastic details have been printed on Zobov 3D-printer model 4 or produced on a laser-cutting machine and been semi-automatically adapted by CATIA v6 CAD-program considering the characteristics of the materials.

The robot can perform almost every manipulating task, such as pushing mechanical “bees”, helping them pollinate flowers; opening the water recuperator, storing the water balls in the revolver cylinder and then sorting them inside the robot. These actions are possible due to Dynamixel AX-12A servomotors which deliver high-precision operation in space-saving manner.

The custom control board is based on STM32F407 ARM Cortex-M4 MCU and can interact with up to 8 optical or mechanical end stops, handle 6 bipolar stepper motors with encoder feedback, operate inductive loads, such as vacuum pumps or electromagnets, and provide a human-machine interface via LCD. It has been engineered specially for our robot in order to achieve the required level of miniaturization. 

The robot is equipped with LiFePO4 batteries and custom battery management system. They provide 40 minutes of continuous work with only 15 minute charge and appear to be the best choice for high-power autonomous appliances.