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Apple often tries to re-engineer the thing they develop.from the ground up. Seems it started this way on Titan, too, then scaled back and decided to focus on th
by ptero 9y ago
Apple often tries to re-engineer the thing they develop.from the ground up. Seems it started this way on Titan, too, then scaled back and decided to focus on the main problem: safely getting around. Nothing wrong with this I think.
On reinvented wheels, early ideas rejected today may get a second life later, e.g. spherical wheels for moving in very constrained environments.
- jacquesm 9y agoIt is absolutely fine to re-engineer something from the ground up once you have a working example in your hand. But before then you are simply wasting your time. the iPod was not the first music player, the iPhone not the first smartphone. Re-engineering those was the only way to get them to market in a way that might drive mass adoption. As for the spherical wheels, yes, however such a development is totally tangential (pun intended) to self driving cars.
- _jal 9y ago> But before then you are simply wasting your time. I disagree. You seem to be discounting the learning aspect. Building an institutional knowledge base of the pile of systems that make up a car is a large task by itself. Different shops approach it differently. One may obsessively reverse engineer the competition, another might tinker with longtime designs. I fully expect the managers in question saw the spherical wheels as something with maybe a 2% chance of becoming a reality, if that. The point at that stage is not to take a particular design to market, it is to explore the problem space, develop expertise, and work out what strategy to pursue. From this article, it sounds like they figured out the strategy.
- jacquesm 9y ago2%? How about 0.0002%.
- ruleabidinguser 9y ago0
- ams6110 9y agoI can't see spherical wheels working well. They would have a smaller contact patch on the road surface than a standard wheel, and consequently less traction.
- jacquesm 9y agoAnd then there is stronger braking to be considered, which almost always is some kind of disk brake which you can't do if there is no shaft to mount one on. Which means the spherical wheel system would have to be oversized to compensate for lack of such a shaft even if it would work to drive the car. Magnetic wheels have other interesting problems that would need to be solved such as when two cars get close to each other the wheels would start to attract or repulse depending on their orientation. This is mostly likely not something that could be rolled out even in a concept car with present day technology unless there is some kind of trick that I'm not aware of. Halbach arrays are not without problems if you allow them to be unconstrained in all dimensions.
- Shorel 9y agoIf they are too big then the car will only have room for two: one in the front and one in the back. TaDa: the self driving Tron motorcycle!
- sillysaurus3 9y agoCould you just use standard wheels, but let all four of them turn 90 degrees? Then the car could move laterally.
- Retric 9y agoThere are some cars that already do this. It's a lot simpler with independent electric motors per wheel, but generally not that useful as self drivings cars can already parallel park just fine.
- jacquesm 9y agoYou only need one wheel to turn very tightly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlLZE23EJKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlLZE23EJKs