Alphanso Rover

Alphanso is the name of a remote-controlled, mecanum-wheeled rover I built. Alphanso was the first ever robot I build indepenendently, so I decided to name it after the first letter of the Greek alphabet. The chassis was 3D-printed, and the electronics are controlled by a DOIT-ESP32-DEVKIT_V1 board. It took about a week in total to design and build. The main reason I started the project is because I wanted to figure out how mecanum wheels worked. I came across them before, but the way they actually functioned was very confusing to me, especially with how they could drive in any direction without turning. After this project, I felt like I had a much better understanding of mecanum drives. Even so, I still went on to develop a drive kinematics simulator, in part for myself, and in part for my school's FRC robotics team. Below is a demo of the mecanum drive in action. The full wiring schematic and code is available in the Github repository.

I also have some images of the 3D model I created so I could dimension the chassis correctly and the physical robot.