How important is a small gear to build a robot? Check out this project

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If you want to build a robot that can move easily, what do you do? It's hard to make it move in steps, but it's much easier to have a wheel, especially if you use a "wheel on a wheel" solution like a Mecanum wheel. You also need some torque to move around. This would be fun to enter into the Hackaday Awards. It's a Mecanum-style wheel with an integrated gear set, and it uses a small and cheap stepper motor to produce quite an impressive torque.

The wheel itself is 3D printed, fully parametric, and the pattern on the wheel is made of nylon Wacker filament. This allows the wheel to roll back and forth like a Mecanum wheel, just like the mobile wheeled robots you see from time to time. It can move forward, backward, and from side to side, with a turning radius of almost zero.

3D printing a mecanum wheel is great, but how do you drive it? This hybrid 3D printed planetary/harmonic gear set solves the drive problem. [Daren] built a very compact "single-stage" gear set that can be mounted on top of a stepper motor. It's thin, flat, and has a gear reduction ratio of about 66:1. This allows for a lot of torque in a very small form factor. The combination of a mecanum wheel and a stepper motor-driven gear set results in a wheel that can achieve a lot of torque.

Although [Daren] hasn’t actually designed a robot with such a wheel yet, it would certainly help make a fantastic robot possible.