Mecanum Wheel
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I think I’ve seen suggestions of using the wheels for mars rovers, but a mecanum wheel that works in sand would need the rollers to be very large, so the actual wheel would be huge. That would suck up all your weight budget for your robot. Ackermann steering is lighter.
All that said, when you have a controlled environment with a flat floor, mecanum wheels are pretty rad!
But something made with scooter wheels could be used to navigate around a city for example. That might be interesting.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006145925410.html
Lego someday should make an official mecanum wheel so that people can use it in competitions.
I got that truck when it was on sale some time ago, only for the wheels. But as others have pointed out, they are not very practical because they gobble up dirt and stuff like nothing else
The math to control them well might be an interesting task for a student perhaps.
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.
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.
There are various papers discussing this topic with four or also three mecanum wheels from the early 2000s (often related to robot soccer). Here's one picked at random: DOI: 10.1109/ICSMC.2006.385024
But yeah, #2 is the primary benefit.
[1]: https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/lanny-smoot-to-be-the-first...