Mecanum Robot Project Details

Mecanum Robot

#art #lasercut #microcontroller #motor #robot #stepper #wood

A bluetooth gamepad-controlled robot with Mecanum wheels.

A photograph of a robot with a laser-cut wood frame and Mecanum wheels

Description

My son said that he wanted to build a robot, so we grabbed a handful of laser-cut construction set pieces and built this. The most exciting feature is probably the Mecanum wheels whose direction of rotation determines which way the robot moves, without any other method of steering. This image shows how this works, with the blue arrows indicating individual wheel rotation direction and the red arrow indicating the robot's direction of travel: You'll notice in the accompanying video that I only implemented movements A, B, C, and E.
I've built three of these now and have parts for three more, with the plan that my kids and their friends can use them for cooperative robot challenges and battles.
It's powered by an ESP32 running a slightly modified bluepath32 firmware.

Videos

More Images

A photograph of two robots with laser-cut wood frames, Mecanum wheels, and two wireless gamepads on the table top in front of them