Re-Inventing The Wheel (For Real)
16th July 2011
Read it. And watch the video.
Pretty cool. You don’t need a transmission — the ball rotates at a constant speed, and your ground speed is controlled by what part of the ball (relative to the center rotation point) touches the ground … which also governs whether you are going forward, backward, or turning.
I suspect that the tricky part would be wear on the hemisphere, and shock absorbtion. But I’m sure that there are engineers who could handle that.
This would be perfect for a gas turbine engine, which really prefers to operate at the same speed all the time.