Hasta La Ideas

This is the craziest design for a drive system I’ve ever seen. Let’s say you had a small wheel, like the one in the photo above, that had a perimeter made up of smaller wheels that rotated in a perpendicular axis. I’m sure you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, so peep the quick vid below and pay close attention:

Now let’s say you placed three of those “omniwheels” in a triangle formation, provided them all with motive power, and placed them in contact with a larger sphere. Then you can do nutty stuff like this (starting around 0:42):

To what end, you ask? A team of engineering students at San Jose State University are working on a spherical drive system (tagline: “Reinventing the wheel”) in order to create an omnidirectional motorcycle.

“Despite having seen spherically driven vehicles in futuristic movies such as I, Robot, there has not been a huge push into the realm of the sphere,” the team writes. “We believe that the versatility of the sphere drive can give us a whole new degree of freedom and safety that we have yet to discover.”

The project’s blog went dead back in May, as the school year wrapped up, but last week the team posted a detailed status update on Facebook. Hit the jump to see the technical challenges the team is currently trying to solve.

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