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Transforming Wheels and More: DARPA's Experimental Military Vehicle Technologies

By Rain Noe - June 25, 2018

Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center has, quite literally, reinvented the wheel. They've developed a shape-shifting, tracked wheel that works as a conventional tire--until a button is pressed, and it reconfigures itself on-the-fly into a tracked triangle:

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The RWT (Reconfigurable Wheel-Track) is one of five fancy tricks rolled out by DARPA's Ground X-Vehicle Technologies program, which "aims to improve mobility, survivability, safety, and effectiveness of future combat vehicles without piling on armor." Take a look at the other four nifty technologies they've developed:

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I'm digging the spider-like vehicle with the super suspension, which has a shocking (see what I did there) six feet of travel--42 inches upwards, 30 inches downwards. However, I would definitely throw up inside that windowless vehicle with the teal and magenta road lines on the screen.

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Transforming Wheels and More: DARPA's Experimental Military Vehicle Technologies

Simon White

2 years ago

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Damnation Alley wasn't the best movie ever, but it had a simpler, more effective system than this, and in 1977. It was real - the film-makers decided it would be easier to build an amphibious vehicle that could drive over broken terrain at high speeds than use special effects. It's often better to look into prior art than to design techno-overkill solutions from scratch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmaster

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Juan Cano

2 years ago

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That's what you should've bought instead of the VW Alltrack

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Rain Noe

I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.