Olaf Winkler Creador April 13

Hello Joerg,
thanks for your comment and for your support. You are right, mecanum wheels are a special form of omniwheels with 45°-rotated wheels at the outside. They are useful for special applications.
Many omniwheels and mecanum wheels I found during my experiments and sourcing were not having ball-bearings. That is why I decided to design the omniwheels from scratch. It took many designs and tries to find something really suitable and sturdy. One of the main challenges when using ball-bearings is to reach a high coverage of omniwheels at the outer diameter compared to open areas not touching the ball. The number of ball-bearings is limited because you need structure material between the ball-bearings to actually carry and fix them. That is also why many omniwheels have two rows of outside wheels. But then the touching point to the ball is not clearly defined any more.
For the Üo I believe, the custom-designed omniwheels are a great solution. Each omniwheel has 27 ball-bearings at the outside. Each ball-bearing is dirt-protected with metal shields on both sides. However, of course, there are physical limits to the grip of the ball-bearings to the ball and of the ball to the ground. That is very similar to any normal tire.
The Üo omniwheel arrangement is made to deliver a ball-rotation result from any one omniwheel that is fully orthogonal to the other two wheels. That means if only one omniwheel is driving the ball, the ball is rotating (purely) the ball-bearings of one of the other omniwheels and around the ball's touching point with the third omniwheel (like on a tip of a needle). The three rotation axes are orthogonal (like an XYZ pyramid). To achieve minimum friction, the omniwheel-outside wheels should be really free-moving --> ball-bearings.
If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me.
Wadersloh is not too far. How about a test ride?
Best regards,

Olaf