Mecanum Kart

The Project

Mecanum Kart is a vehicle which was built with the target to show the advantages and the coolness of the mecanum wheels. The main hardware part is the Raspberry Pi which controls the wheels through the PWM controller and the motor drivers. The driver controls the kart using a joystick with rudder function for rotating around its own axis. It also has a display where the UI shows the kart state including joystick values, calculated wheel speeds and others.

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Team Comments

We decided to make this project to show that there is an alternative way of driving a vehicle and in the same time being even easier to control it, using mecanum wheels.

The most difficult part of making the kart was building the software, more exactly calculating the speed of the motors, synchronizing the threads and showing the arrow on the UI that represents the direction of the kart. I managed to make them after a lot of research.

In the future, we are planning to implement distance sensors to make the kart stop if there is an obstacle in front of it, voltage sensors to check the battery status, lights and a horn, having the code already prepared for them.