| ▲ | foxglacier 11 hours ago | |
This kind of mechanism is fascinating. I built a four-wheeled version and even that is beautifully smooth when one wheel goes over a bump because the chasis maintains an average orientation based on the positions of all the wheels. The video shows an 8-wheeled one but it still only has two rows of wheels. I've wondered how to generalize it to an arbitrarily sized grid of wheels so a vehicle would be like a flexible mat that conforms to the ground. I couldn't work that out but I'm no Don Bickler. FEA software has a feature called "RBE3" which models an even more general case of any number of "wheels" and they can also move in any direction while still keeping the orientation of the "chassis" (dependent node) rigidly determined by their average displacements. The "R" stands for rigid because every part is rigid or completely free - no springs! There seems to be nothing like it in machines or nature but it's a beuatifully elegent and seemingly natural mechanism - if it was possible to build. | ||