The Mecanum wheel is a design for a wheel that can move a vehicle in any direction. It is sometimes known as the Ilon wheel after its inventor, Bengt Erland Ilon, who came up with the idea when he was an engineer for the Swedish company Mecanum AB. The US patent UU It was completed on November 13, 1972.
It is a conventional wheel with a series of rollers attached to its circumference. These rollers each typically have an axis of rotation at 45 ° with respect to the plane of the wheel and at 45 ° with respect to a line passing through the center of the roller parallel to the axis of rotation of the wheel. A typical configuration is the four-wheel mobile omnidirectional robot URANUS (pictured) or a wheeled wheelchair Mecanum (similar to the one shown in the picture). By alternating the wheels with left and right-handed rollers, so that each wheel applies force approximately at right angles to the diagonal of the wheelbase, the wheel is on, the vehicle is stable and can move in any direction and rotate by varying the speed and direction of rotation of each wheel. Moving the four wheels in the same direction causes a forward or backward movement, the wheels on one side in the opposite direction to the other cause the vehicle to rotate and the wheels on one diagonal in the opposite direction to the other Diagonal causes lateral movement. The combinations of these movements of the wheels allow the movement of the vehicle in any direction with any rotation of the vehicle (even without rotation).
The US Navy UU He bought the patent from Ilon and put the researchers to work on it in the 1980s in Panama City. The US Navy UU He has used it to transport objects around ships. In 1997, Airtrax Incorporated and several other companies paid the US Navy $ 2,500 for technology rights, including old drawings of how motors and controllers worked, to build an omnidirectional forklift that could maneuver in tight spaces like the cover of an aircraft carrier. These vehicles are now in production.
Tracked vehicles and skid steer loaders use similar methods to turn. However, these vehicles normally crawl on the ground while spinning and can cause considerable damage to a soft or brittle surface. The high friction against the ground during the turn also requires high torque motors to overcome the friction. In comparison, the design of the Mecanum wheel allows a rotation in place with minimal ground friction and low torque.