for EECS and CSE Majors at UC Irvine
Re-inventing the wheel
This is an archive site. Current senoir design projects are at https://projects.eng.uci.edu.
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Introduction:
Automotive tires have been, for the most part, unchanged since its conception. These tires have become an industry standard for transportation and can be seen on nearly every vehicle. Our senior project team believes that it is time to transition forward towards a new design that will increase efficiency and benefit users everywhere. With this idea, we have decided to reinvent the wheel by pursuing an axle-free solution in the form of a spherical tire body. We envisioned that spherical tires have the potential to revolutionize the future of automobiles by optimizing maneuverability without sacrificing the user experience. Spherical tires pave way to unique abilities such as lateral movement and pivots as well as higher traction and accuracy. This can prove useful in everyday situations such as parking in narrow spaces and parallel parking, both of which common people struggle with everyday.
Meet the team:
Aaron Orpia: EE specializing in Communications and Rf/Antennas
Paul Vintimilla: EE specializing in Communications and DSP
Jerald Marquez :EE specializing in Communications
Professor Keyue Smedley: Research includes power electronics, alternative energy power generation, and motion control
Progress:
Our initial plans were to make a magnetic levitating dome but it did not answer our question of how to actuate any type of movement in the wheek. Our next idea was to create an innovative three dimensional step motor with electromagnetic coils in a dome that houses the spherical tire which is embedded with permanent magnets. We decided not to move forward with this due to the difficulty and time limitiation.
Moving forward, we have concluded that a more mechanical based design would. We are basing the technology on the highly popular BB8 toy by Disney’s Star Wars franchise. The inner mechanism consist of a self correction robot with omni wheels that turn in order to displace the center of mass. This can be imagined as a hamster running in a ball in order to move.
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