This Thing Might Change How Robots Work 🤖

In partnership with

Hey — It’s Ali.

If you can make things move like robots, you will realize how much pain turning them is. That’s why there are multiple wheel designs that make this process efficient.

One of them is the Mecanum wheel, which can move in any direction without the vehicle turning. Sounds impossible, right? But it’s a reality.

And it’s about to change everything you thought you knew about how things move.

How this clever engineering works

Each roller, which looks like a mini barrel, is positioned at a 45-degree angle to the wheel’s axis of rotation. When you spin the wheel, the rollers create a force vector split between the forward direction and sideways.

By controlling the rotation of four Mecanum wheels independently, you can make a robot or a vehicle move in literally any direction without turning.

For example, if we spin the left wheels forward and the right wheels backward, the forward and backward forces cancel out, leaving only the sideways motion.

Suddenly, you’re sliding left or right like a crab. And this clever force cancellation is what makes Mecanum wheels so special.

Well, this person who built a toy version explains in his full video that it’s all about trade-offs like everything in engineering.

Mecanum wheel pros and cons

First of all, Mecanum wheels are more complex, expensive, and have less traction than traditional wheels. Similarly, they also consume a lot of energy and this reduces their efficiency.

But on the other side, if applied in the right application, like warehouse robots or hospitals that need to squeeze through tight spaces, other planet explorations, they’re absolute game changers.

Mecanum vs Omni wheels

If you are well informed or have worked with Omni Wheel before, you might confuse both of them. As they look similar from one angle.

But that is not accurate.

First of all, Omni wheels have rollers at a 90-degree angle so they drag in the “wrong” direction. On the other side, Mecanum rollers are at a 45-degree angle.

This might seem like a very small difference, but this difference leads to all rotation translations, which requires vector math, as this video points out.