The Mecanum wheel is one design for a wheel which can move in any direction. It is sometimes called the Ilon wheel after its Swedish inventor, Bengt Ilon, who came up with the idea in 1973 when he was an engineer with the Swedish company Mecanum AB.
It is a conventional wheel with a series of rollers attached to its circumference. These rollers have an axis of rotation at 45° to the plane of the wheel in a plane parallel to the axis of rotation o...
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The Mecanum wheel is one design for a wheel which can move in any direction. It is sometimes called the Ilon wheel after its Swedish inventor, Bengt Ilon, who came up with the idea in 1973 when he was an engineer with the Swedish company Mecanum AB.
It is a conventional wheel with a series of rollers attached to its circumference. These rollers have an axis of rotation at 45° to the plane of the wheel in a plane parallel to the axis of rotation of the wheel. A typical configuration is the four-wheeled one of the URANUS omni-directional mobile robot (pictured) or a wheel chair with Mecanum wheels (similar to that pictured). By alternating wheels with left and right-handed rollers, so that each wheel applies force roughly at right angles to the diagonal the wheel is on, the vehicle is stable and can be made to move in any direction and turn by varying the speed and direction of rotation of each wheel. Moving all four wheels in the same direction causes forward or backward movement,...
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