One of the first of many crises that engulfed the post-Clarkson Top Gear was accusations of "disrespect" after Matt LeBlanc drove spheres of burnt rubber into a road close to the Cenotaph in London.
We also had to sacrifice accuracy of the robot due to inability of the design to drive the sphere straight in the cardinal directions (+,-x and +,-y).
The new version uses an induction motor, which magnetically drives the sphere (solid iron, with a copper shell) with stators, the way other induction motors would drive a rotor.
A time-driven hard sphere algorithm is combined to simulate the motion of individual particles, in which particles interact with each other via hard-sphere collisions, the collision detection and motion of particles are performed at constant time intervals.
However, Su was most famous for his hydraulic-powered astronomical clock tower, crowned with a mechanically driven armillary sphere, which was erected in the capital city of Kaifeng in the year 1088.
In the sphere, drive chains can stick or snap.
The sphere drive is hollow, helping to provide buoyancy as well as locomotion when the Terrainiac takes to the water.
Scheduled to go on sale in the summer for about $80, the Terrainiac is a futuristic-looking vehicle powered by a single rear wheel that is a complex treaded ball, referred to by its makers as a "sphere drive".
In water, the primary measurements were the torque required to drive the inner sphere (from a reaction flange torque sensor), pressure measurements, and wall-shear and UDV measurements.
For some Ro values, moreover, it was found that the system exhibited bistability, switching between two distinct states as determined by the torque required to drive the inner sphere at its rotation rate (Zimmerman et al. 2011).
