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 having an axis of rotation at 45° to the plane of the wheel in a plane parallel to the axis of rotation of the wheel. As well as moving forward and backward like conventional wheels, they allow sideways movement by spinning wheels on the front and rear axles in opposite directions.

The US Navy bought the patent from Ilon and put researchers to work on it in the 1980s in Panama City. The Navy has used it for transporting items around ships. In 1997 Airtrax Inc. and several other companies each paid the Navy $2,500 for rights to the technology, including old drawings of how the motors and controllers worked, to build an omni-directional forklift truck that could maneuver in tight spaces such as the deck of an aircraft carrier. These vehicles are now in production.

See also

• Omni wheel

External links

• Bengt Erland Ilon's US Patent for Wheels for a course stable selfpropelling vehicle movable in any desired direction on the ground or some other base (.pdf file) April 8 1975
• Airtrax - The video footage on this website clearly shows vehicles moving sideways, turning on the spot, moving diagonally, and combining these movements.
• Orlando Business Journal article Omnics' wheel of fortune rolls into production by Chad Eric Watt, 31 May 2002
• The Wall Street Journal online Bringing Military Tech to the Factory Floor by Paulette Thomas, 9 May 2005
• Wheel chair with Mecanum wheels The wheel chair was presented at the 2006 EVER Monaco
• Segway RMP Video of a Segway robot with Mecanum wheels
• CMU's "Tessellator" robot designed in 1992 for servicing Space Shuttle tiles used Mecanum wheels