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Robots With Square Wheels?
Roland Piquepaille writes "About eighteen months ago, I told you about a tricycle with square wheels which needed a specially designed road. But now, Distributed Robotics, a company from Troy, N.Y., is developing robots with square wheels which don't need specific roads. These new 'cars' propel themselves on flat surfaces by taking advantage of gravity. This might sound crazy, but the inventors think it could lead to new robots and toys, and more generally to new micro-machines or MEMS applications."
I have to ask: why? What is the advantage of this means of propulsion? What are the special applications for this system?
It's not a perpetum mobile; it needs energy to work, just like any other propulsion system. It seems to me that this type of propulsion would have a significantly lower efficiency than an ordinary, circular wheel system.
Neither the article, nor the homepage (which just went on it's knees, so don't bother clicking the link anytime today. They have a counter that will only go as high as 99999 visitors, poor fools) explains why this would be a superior means of propulsion for any application.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Why are folks so obsessed with literally reinventing the wheel?
Because if, against all odds, you managed to do it, you'd be rich and famous beyond your wildest dreams.
Besides, what's the challenge of trying to invent something when people believe it _can_ be done?
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You are correct that a conventional road is circular (or at least much closer to being circular than the straight line that we perceive it to be). However, the constraints of the problem (from the article) included "keeping the axle moving in a straight line and at a constant velocity". Clearly a conventional road fails to meet this constraint since objects moving along a circular path are not traveling at a constant velocity.
http://www.globalcomposites.net.nyud.net:8090/Rein venting%20the%20Wheel%201.mpg
Not only did you miss the joke, you didn't even ge the right fastener.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Still, analyzing why it would be so bad at stairs leaves you with an excellent sense of why it wouldn't be suitable for any surface except the artificially perfect sort that conventional wheels and drive systems already perform so much faster, smoother, and more efficiently on. Some guys found a novel way to make a thing stumble awkwardly forward under ideal conditions and are trying to get some quick PR by claiming it could be useful for something when it's really just a solution - and not even a very good one - in search of a problem.
Why are folks so obsessed with literally reinventing the wheel?
The contact information at the bottom of the page gives it away if you know the guy, which I do: Steve Derby was my advisor and one of my professors at RPI just this past spring. He's the type of person who loves to tinker with new ideas and who will probably come up with a revolutionary solution to some problem. Our projects for that class involved coming up with an idea that interested us and running with it for a few weeks (using the methods we learned in the class, of course). Most of the class predictibly came up with half-baked ideas that needed a lot of work (mine fell into this category), but some of the people came up with some truly good ideas, and you could tell that Derby loved seeing these ideas and learning from them.
I don't know the other person who's listed there, but I would guess that he's an RPI alumnus.
Also, I can see this working without a "rotating turret of doom" mounted to it. Imagine one of these carts moving about a pitching and rolling ship (or even just a roling one, with a bit of thinking about it). I can't see how square wheels would be _practical_ for anything but a novelty, but maybe someone smarter than me will find a use for it.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
no one has made a road and a wheel in which the two are the same? obviously this person has never used a gear and rail... duh...