What’s the strangest wheel? The omniwheel. Unless you count whegs — “wheel legs” — as wheels. This research paper from Shanghai Technical University explores a mash-up of the two ideas, where the wheels roll as standard omniwheels until a servo on the axle unfurls them into their whegs configuration. The result? OmniWhegs!
The resulting vehicle is a bit of a departure from the original whegs concept, which used compliant mechanisms which passively balanced the force across the legs. Here, the omniwhegs are rigid and actually use a synchronization routine that you can see in the video embedded below.
If you can’t get enough omniwheels, you’re not alone. Here’s a rare three-wheeler, and here’s an omniwheel made of MDF. We haven’t seen enough whegs-based bots, but OutRunner is pretty astounding, and we think deserves a second look.
We’ve also seen wheels that convert to whegs before, but without the omni. And we don’t know if that one ever made it out of render-of-a-robot phase.
So kudos to the Shanghai team for taking the strangest possible wheels and actually building them!
Gone are the days of my news being either, “paper or plastic”?
I love this concept, and have been looking into similar mechanisms for awhile, but I’ve run into needing specialized mechanisms (stair-climbing, rough terrain, etc.) for a more elegant(?) solution. This seems more like a scatter-gun approach, which seems more likely to succed quickly in iterating possible uses/scenarios.
SmartWheels™
Waitasecond, I’ve seen this before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W4MYJt8c4w
Wow, good memory. The YouTube video is 15 years old. The old version incorporates the Whegs, but lacks the Omni wheels.
Need a teardown on “The Animal”!
Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syUfxj4OYi8
First thing I thought of. I had one of these as a child in the 80s
I can see why they did not take a photo from the left side
Sicilians can do it with 3 whegs.
Isle of Man as well
Just what Segways need.
Segwhegs?
What? Some swastika wheels? Shure?
What do you mean specifically? We _do_ care.
It always seems to me that the legs are on the wrong direction. Shouldn’t they grip on the surface instead of relying on friction from the rollers ?
Gription! 😋
Now if they could only invent a way to overcome the swastika stigma.
Yeah, the thumbnail pic for this story had me wondering if someone missed the obvious similarity.
Thumbnailer here — yeah, I did entirely miss it.
Ze Germans really should have put them on one of their tanks. What a missed opportunity
What stigma? This is from China where it is a religious symbol.
Also Navajo, Hindu and others. Some not religious
Other than the fact that these appear to be Mecanum whegs, rather than omniwhegs, I don’t see a problem.
1966 Major Matt Mason Space Crawler (flashbacks!)
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