Development of an Omni-directional Human-friendly Mobility Platform for Industrial Warehouse

A mobility platform has been widely used in many applications due to its load and transportation capacity. Movement capability, position estimation, and human interaction functions are essential in the mobility platform. This paper proposed a mobility platform to apply for intelligent factories or parcel distribution warehouses. In the mobility platform, a novel power train structure with a drive-suspension integrated module is proposed to enhance the load capability and drive in arbitrary direction movement. Consequently, the mobility platform can be modified to treat the various sizes of load objects. Moreover, the paper presents the sensor fusion algorithm that uses low-cost sensors to estimate the position of the mobility platform. Additionally, the user-friendly motion to intuitively maneuver the mobility system is a particular function compared with conventional mobility platforms. Several experiment results verify the proposed algorithms, including position control in a given path, position measurement, and one-hand maneuvering test.