James Bruton Experiments with a Wave Drive Again

There are a whole lot of different ways to make something move. The most common is, of course, rolling on wheels. Wheels are the most efficient means of locomotion, by far — at least when traveling over smooth ground. But sometimes you need to move across something other than a nice paved road, which is why engineers develop other ways to locomote. One interesting alternative to wheels is the wave drive, which lets a vehicle crawl across terrain a bit like an inch worm does. In his most recent video, James Bruton once again experimented with a wave drive robot.

This isn't Burton's first attempt at building a functional wave drive. Bruton seems to really enjoy designing robots with unusual drive mechanisms and first experimented with a wave drive about 5 months ago. That strange, wiggly robot did work, but it didn't work well. It was ridiculously inefficient and couldn't traverse even small obstacles, which made it almost useless. But Bruton isn't that easily deterred and decided to approach the problem from another direction. In this video, he demonstrates his new design.

The new wave drive looks like a long row of slabs. Each of those slabs can move up and down, but is constrained in the other axes (with just a little bit of forward/backward slop). Rubber bands pull the slabs upwards and a rotating drum on top has cams to push the slabs down in sequence. The pattern created by the moving slabs resembles a wave, hence the name. A standard DC motor spins the drum via a belt that provides a gear reduction.

But once again, this design failed. The robot could move forward, but that was really only due to vibration. Because the slabs only moved up and down, there was nothing actually pushing the robot forward.

Bruton then added a flexible rubber sheet beneath the slabs. The idea was that the vertical movement would cause the sheet to move backward slightly, pushing the robot forward. Again, this failed.

Next, he added grooves in the cams to tilt the slabs forwards and backwards as they move vertically. Sadly, this didn't work either. The grooves didn't move the slabs forward or back enough to move the robot. At this point, Bruton threw in the towel on this experiment. But he has ideas on how to make a wave drive work in the future, so be sure to subscribe to his channel so you can see when he finally builds a functional wave drive.