[heja2009]

AND no dust, grime, etc. These tiny wheels get dirty and clog up pretty fast in human environments and then stop to work and need a good cleaning. Nice for demos but unsuitable for even normal research lab work. I hate them.

[ragebol]

They suck for carpet as well, which you'll find in a home environtment. The diagonal motion chews carpet with short strands up over time. If you have long strands in a carpet, you'll lock up in those pretty fast I suppose, though I never tried it.

I tested the robots in the picture I linked, once in a 'help a human' emergency scenario test: the 'host' dropped on the floor. With her long hair spread around. We E-stopped the robot because it drove close to that hair and we didn't want to risk it getting in the rollers. That would have been very ugly.

[Tepix]

There are mecanum wheels even for pretty big forklifts used in not very clean environments …

[ragebol]

Bigger mecanum wheels. What matters is the size of the rollers wrt the size of the obstacles they face.

[unwind]

Uh, I've never worked with them, but the linked Wikipedia article states that the US Navy did early development in order to create equipment to move things aboard aircraft carriers. I've never been to one of those, either, but it sure seems like an environment that might be a bit more challenging than a robotics lab.

Plus there's an image of a container-slinging machine being used at airports.

So I guess my point is that I'm sorry you were burned by them, but they do seem to be usable in the real world, too.

Also: had forgotten the inventor was kinda Swedish, yay! :)

Edit: I made it sound like the container-machine used Mecanum wheels on the tarmac which of course is not the case.

[ainiriand]

Parent comment I believe refers to using the wheels as a means of horizontal displacement, not to move items on top of them. They pick up dirt from the floor that is hard to remove.