LIRS-ArtBul: Design, Modelling and Construction of an Omnidirectional Chassis for a Modular Multipurpose Robotic Platform

Service robotics is a promising area of commercializing robotic solutions of various kinds, from education and medical services to entertainment and advertisement. It might be useful to construct a series of different specialized service robots that have a modular construction and share the same chassis. Such approach allows to reuse encapsulated locomotion libraries instead of their development from scratch for each model of a robot and easily add or replace particular robot modules depending on a target task or an operational environment. This paper provides a tutorial on developing an omnidirectional mecanum wheeled chassis for a modular multipurpose robotic platform. We describe a chassis design, modelling in Blender, selection of components, assembly process and basic locomotion software development. We used Gazebo simulator for robot behaviour emulation due to its support of the Robot Operating System (ROS). For control Raspberry PI 4 and Arduino Mega2560 modules were employed. The chassis model behavior was validated in virtual environments of Gazebo and, after assembling, in real world locomotion scenarios. The chassis will be further employed in development of several new in-house mobile platforms, which could serve for particular purposes within the service robotics field.