These Clever Wheels Turn Into Tracks And We Can't Stop Watching
When it comes to designing a military vehicle that can tackle rough surfaces, you’re left with a dilemma. It’s hard to beat the go-anywhere ability of tracks, but that setup is limited when it comes to performance on less challenging terrain. You could opt for conventional wheels instead, but if the going gets too tough, you could get stuck. And in a war zone that could be deadly.
However, a team from the lengthily-named Carnegie Mellon University National Robotics Engineering Center (or CMU NREC, an acronym we suspect gets used a lot) has a different philosophy: why not both. What they’ve devised is called the ‘Reconfigurable Wheel Track’ - a “shape-shifting” wheel which in just two seconds morphs into a triangle-shaped track. Stick one at each corner, and you’ll have a vehicle with an incredible breadth of abilities. RWT can even make the transformation on the move.
It’s very early days for the technology, which has been developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. It could be some time before we see it deployed in the field, but for now, we’ll just sit slack-jawed watching that transformation again and again. It’s a little hypnotic.
Via The Drive
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
whoa mama… this is the F U T U R E
It was the future ever since smartphones became mainstream.
Better install that at a Jeep and never go off-roading
I SWEAR TO GOD! i hate those people
The thing is, a normal offroad tire is way better. This thing will get no grip because it’s hard, while a tire is super soft with low pressure.
My whole school is like this. And hey ride around in their 4-cyl ßchisse boxes with all the stupid aftermarket LED’s and Bull Bars gloating about how cool they are… i really, REALLY, hate it
Every person around here in Louisiana. Jeeps are cleaner than lowered cars but my Rav4 always looks like it’s fresh out of a mud pit
Am I the only one who paid more attention to the suspensions part than to the wheels? :(
No lol
woah
Rotary wheels confirmed.
Technically speaking, they arent wheels/tracks, theyre just tracks. They just so hapoen to sometimes form a circle, but its still drive wheels powering a track for movement, not a whole wheel rotating
You can see in the videos that after a full 2-second transition between ‘Track Mode’ and ‘Wheel Mode’, the entire ‘wheel’ starts rotating as a complete assembly. In other words, the dorito in the middle starts rotating, too, which is rather genius in my eyes. I can only think of the work required to balance such a contraption…
This+bose electric suspension=year 3000
This would have have been very useful to armored cars in ww2
just imagine, some day, this will be a casual run-off-the-mill winter tire…
I was always told “don’t go reinventing the wheel” didn’t think it could be done!