Floor cleaning robots have been developed to cater to building maintenance needs. Complete area coverage is crucial for a floor cleaning robot, and its morphology design plays a vital role in realizing complete area coverage. However, floor cleaning robots with fixed morphologies have difficulty in achieving a high area coverage performance. Mass customization of a robot’s morphology would improve its productivity in terms of area coverage. This paper proposes a novel system that can be used for mass customizing the morphology of a robot to improve area coverage performance in an environment of interest. The customized morphology is determined through an optimization technique by considering an environment of interest and design constraints. The area coverage of a candidate morphology design is evaluated by simulating the robot navigation in an environment of interest. Generalized pattern search, particle swarm optimization, and surrogate optimization are independently considered optimization techniques. Experiments have been conducted considering the cases of robot deployments. The statistical conclusions on experimental results validate that the proposed system can synthesize a morphology that significantly improves the area coverage performance in an environment of interest.

The holonomic and omnidirectional capabilities imparted to the mobile base platform depends mainly on two factors, i.e., the wheel design and its various arrangements in the platform chassis. This paper reports on the development of a novel omnidirectional spherical sectioned wheel named Ospheel. It is modular, and the spherical sectioned geometry of the wheel is driven using two actuators placed inside the housing above the wheel that rotates it independently about two perpendicular axes. The mechanical drive system for Ospheel consists of two gear trains, namely, internal spur gear and crown gear spatially assembled in orthogonal planes and are driven by two driving pinions. The kinematics of a single Ospheel is described, followed by the kinematic equation of a robot equipped with two Ospheels. Forward and inverse kinematic equations are derived explicitly. Experiments were carried out with the two Ospheels at a fixed inclination assembled with the base to illustrate the holonomic motion. The robustness of the wheel design is experimented with different trajectories and on different terrains.