Mecanum wheels under varying loads

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by dellagd

Ive also been curious about 'perfecting' a mecanum drive system by taking the load on each wheel and programming the drive to account for the uneven loading.

Varying the normal force "load" on each wheel has two primary effects. One is a subtle change in the wheel speed vs motor voltage. That can be compensated for using closed-loop control of wheel speed. The other is a significant change in the maximum thrust that the wheel can apply before slipping. That one is not so easy to account for, though I suspect monitoring the motor current can provide a way to do traction control and turn the wheel slip problem into a maximum robot acceleration problem.