  Omni-directional mobile robot (OMR) systems have been very popular in
academia and industry for their superb maneuverability and flexibility. Yet
their potential has not been fully exploited, where the extra degree of freedom
in OMR can potentially enable the robot to carry out extra tasks. For instance,
gimbals or sensors on robots may suffer from a limited field of view or be
constrained by the inherent mechanical design, which will require the chassis
to be orientation-aware and respond in time. To solve this problem and further
develop the OMR systems, in this paper, we categorize the tasks related to OMR
chassis into orientation transition tasks and position transition tasks, where
the two tasks can be carried out at the same time. By integrating the parallel
task goals in a single planning problem, we proposed an orientation-aware
planning architecture for OMR systems to execute the orientation transition and
position transition in a unified and efficient way. A modified trajectory
optimization method called orientation-aware timed-elastic-band (OATEB) is
introduced to generate the trajectory that satisfies the requirements of both
tasks. Experiments in both 2D simulated environments and real scenes are
carried out. A four-wheeled OMR is deployed to conduct the real scene
experiment and the results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of
simultaneously executing parallel tasks and is applicable to real-life
scenarios.
