Design and implementation of an omnidirectional mobile robot platform with unified I/O interfaces

Nowadays, mobile robots have been investigated in many scenarios. Among varieties of mobile robots, their I/O interfaces varies a lot, which seriously hinders the popularity of mobile robots. A practical and versatile mobile robot platform is needed both in academic research and industrial applies. In this paper, we designed a low-cost omnidirectional mobile robot platform, named Savvy. Savvy is equipped with a variety of unified I/O interfaces and multifunctional. The software system framework of this platform is built based on ROS. We extended a number of functions for Savvy and carried out four experiments, including motion calibration, SLAM, autonomous navigation and pedestrian following. The results verified that Savvy is adaptive to indoor environment with high positioning precision, which can be employed in logistics and various HRI applications.