Mecanum wheel 3D model

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The Mecanum wheel is a design for a wheel which can move a vehicle 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 typically each have an axis of rotation at 45° to the plane of the wheel and at 45° to a line through the centre of the roller parallel to the axis of rotation of the wheel. Moving all four wheels in the same direction causes forward or backward movement, running the wheels on one side in the opposite direction to those on the other side causes rotation of the vehicle, and running the wheels on one diagonal in the opposite direction to those on the other diagonal causes sideways movement. Combinations of these wheel motions allow for vehicle motion in any direction with any vehicle rotation (including no rotation at all).