Energy-Optimal Motion Trajectory of an Omni-Directional Mecanum-Wheeled Robot via Polynomial Functions

The Mecanum wheel is one of the practical omni-directional wheel designs in industry, especially for heavy-duty tasks in a confined floor. An issue with Mecanum-wheeled robots is inefficient use of energy. In this study, the robotic motion trajectories are optimized to minimize the energy consumption, where a robotic path is expressed in polynomial functions passing through a given set of via points, and a genetic algorithm is used to find the polynomial's coefficients being decision variables. To attempt a further reduction in the energy consumption, the via points are also taken as decision variables for the optimization. Both simulations and experiments are conducted, and the results show that the optimized trajectories result in a significant reduction in energy consumption, which can be further lowered when the via points become decision variables. It is also found that the higher the order of the polynomials the larger the reduction in the energy consumption.