New Spherical Tires of Goodyear

Reinventing the wheel, and replacing something simple with something complex. I personally would not feel safe rolling down the highway on wheels that could decide to rotate around a different axis due to a sensor malfunction.

Spherical Tires

I agree, for tires, round is good..... square is bad.

Depends on the track!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoYQaiKfayU

Parallel Parking: Solved!

One of my coworkers introduced me to these wheels for robots:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecanum_wheel

They're called mecanum wheels and come in left hand and right hand pairs. Four can be mounted to a base with the front pair and rear pair being opposites and the two on each side being opposite as shown above.

Each wheel is driven independently. If all wheels are driven in the same direction at the same speed, the robot moves forward or backward. Reversing the direction of the right hand wheels as opposed to the left hand wheels generates a sideways motion. Opposite sideways motion from the front and back makes it rotate.

By controlling all four motors independently, any combination of translation and rotation can be achieved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDgmRz1Gb7Q

They're ideally suited for robots that move items around a warehouse because the robot can be easily maneuvered to the load to be moved.

Unfortunately, I don't think it would be rugged enough for a road vehicle (and possibly a little too bumpy!).

That reminds me mostly of meconium. Brilliant choice of words, that.

Not just robots, they're a boon to human driven fork trucks as well, less of a need to drive backwards⁽¹⁾ due to lack of space for a Y-turn.

Notes:

1. Obviously there are still times where you need to drive backwards⁽²⁾, such as when the load obscures the forwards view, or when traveling down an incline with any load⁽³⁾, or when the isle is too narrow for even a rotate in place, such as when loading/unloading a trailer⁽⁴⁾.
2. OSHA regulations.
3. OSHA regulations.
4. Basic physics.
   

Oh boy, Yellow Taxi-Crabs!

1. I hate to think of the cost of replacing a tire that gets a flat.

2. Hit a speed bump too fast might cause you to lose all your balls.

Bumper car rides will never be the same....

...next....

So someone at Goodyear decided to steal the tire design from the 12 year old I Robot movie?

So can I expect an Ironman suit from Goodyear sometime around 2020?

There are a lot of details missing here. How is torque coupled to the wheels and how efficient is this transfer? How does the levitation work and can it fail? How much energy does it use? How do brakes work (maybe turn off the levitation )? How does it handle side force going around a curve?

I would like to see a working model and see it work.

IMHO, it's another of the Rube Goldberg designs that seem to be increasingly common these days. Simple machines work best.

I suppose it would depend how the energy is put into the wheels alright. I suspect they would have to transmit by E-M waves, apparently the wheels would have to be wanting to roll based on an imbalance in the levitation field? Only a guess, since I have little experience with levitating things with magnets. On the other hand, they could load X number of lemmings per square cm of tire surface on the inner walls, with some lemmings doing the hamster ball dance, and others on spin cycle waiting for a command to appear on the in-transmit movie to go run over the cliff.

How very "I,Robot" (about the first decent example I can remember seeing which also incudes multi-directional steering).

Potentially very useful (especially with monitored and controlled uniform tyre wear greatly increasing tyre life), plus it would be nice to drive down the road sideways or have the car doing 360's down the motorway. Get pulled over by the cops "do you know how fast you were spinning when I stopped you?"

Show me how that works in 8" of fresh snow!

Seems like an expensive energy budget is required for motion.

Very high unsprung weight.

Expensive tires.

All this to avoid learning parallel parking.

I really do not know, but I would have to agree that unless we are talking superconducting magnet levitation, with some sort of inductive coupling into the tire, I don't see any way to set these in motion. I agree that there are plenty other fronts that require more attention.

Take for example, the samurai sword. We have a lack of capacity to make the highest quality swords here in the United States. We will need a lot more of these when Mr. Trump declares himself Shogun. The feudal system requires Samurai to maintain order, and preserve discipline in the most strict manner. Hey, you, other there, eyes to the ground!