Omniwhegs are twice as great

What is the weirdest wheel? The omniwheel. Unless you count whegs - "wheel legs" - as wheels. This research paper from Shanghai Technical University explores a mix of the two ideas, where the wheels roll like standard omniwheels until a servo on the axle deploys them into their whegs configuration. The result? OmniWhegs!

The resulting vehicle is a bit different from the whegs original concept, which used soft mechanics that passively balanced the force on the legs. The omniwhegs here are rigid and actually use a timing routine which you can see in the embedded video below.

If you can't get enough omni wheels, you're not alone. Here is a rare three-wheeler, and here is an MDF omniwheel. We haven't seen enough wheg-based bots, but OutRunner is pretty amazing, and we think it deserves a second look.

We've also seen wheels that convert to whegs before, but without the omni. And we don't know if this one has ever come out of the rendering phase of a robot.

Congratulations to the Shanghai team for taking the weirdest wheels possible and building them!