A new video has been making its way around the internet as of late. Though the interest isn't on the car, but on the rather unique "wheels" supporting it. These wheels can quickly transform into treads.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) released a video not long ago showing off a number of technologies they've been working on for improving the utilitarian potential of vehicle wheels. One of which was called the Reconfigurable Wheel Track.



DARPA has a history making technologies for the military, ranging from laser defense systems to remote control insects. Now they've put some focus on how to make a wheel that can handle any terrain. Thus, the RWT was born.

Attached to a Hummer as a proof of concept, these wheels have two modes: tire and tread. Tire mode operates as a normal tire would. It's a round shape with off-road threading for quick speeds and smooth control on flat surfaces. When you activate tread mode, the wheel will flatten into a triangular shape and the wheel rotation will be replaced with tread rotation instead. This is ideal for extreme terrains. The RWT can not only transition between these modes in only two seconds, they can even do it while the vehicle is in motion.

While this is certainly an impressive idea, I can't help but be concerned about a few things. First, how expensive are these wheels? I know that our military has a massive budget, but if it costs half a million dollars to make a Hummer, then it's hard to justify. Two, how reliable is it? These wheels appear to have many different moving parts, I could imagine some debris getting in the system and mucking things up really quickly.