Design and fabrication of prototype model of Mecanum wheel forklift-A review

Mechanical enginnering

In this paper, we review researches on multi-directional automobile design with Mecanum wheel as component in the forklift vehicle. Multi-directional automobile has vast advantages over conventional design likes differential drive in term of mobility in congested environments. Multi-directional automobile could perform important tasks in environments congested with static and/or dynamic obstacle and narrow aisles, such as those commonly found in manufacturing floor, warehouses, offices and hospitals. A variety of designs of Mecanum wheel installed forklift have been developed in recent years in order to improve their Multi-directional maneuver and practical applications. These features are expanded at the expense of improved mechanical complication and increased complexity in control mechanism. Mecanum wheel systems work by applying rotating force of each individual wheel in one direction similar to regular wheels with a different in the fact that Mecanum wheel systems are able to slide freely in a different direction, in other word, they can slide frequently perpendicular to the torque vector. The main advantage of using Mecanum wheel systems is that translational and rotational motions are decoupled for simple motion although in making an allowance for the fastest possible motion this is not essentially the case.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.