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Mecanum wheel

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Mecanum wheel
Mecanum wheelchair

The Mecanum wheel is 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 a pair of wheels 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.

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