Multi-axis Reorientation of a Free-falling Omnidirectional Wheeled Robot

This paper presents reorientation manoeuvres applied to an omnidirectional wheeled robot for impact mitigation during short falls. The proposed robot architecture aims to build upon recent innovations in reorientation robots to attain fast, multi-axis reorientation. Indeed, the use of omnidirectional wheels allows for simplifications to be made with respect to previous mobile robot architectures that make the proposed architecture more efficient for free fall reorientation, while still maintaining free roaming capabilities. To test these improvements, a prototype is built and a free roam and two free fall demonstrations are completed. On the one hand, the free roam demonstration validates that translation along both horizontal axes and rotation about the yaw axis are achieved with the presented prototype. On the other hand, the first free fall demonstration shows that a worst case scenario of a 180-degree reorientation about one axis can be completed in just under 0.45 seconds (one-metre fall) and the second free fall demonstration validates that the prototype is capable of simultaneous reorientation about both the roll and pitch axes. Therefore, the fast, multi-axis reorientation capabilities of the developed prototype are verified.