Project Critter

A tank advances on an enemy position. Suddenly, a loud explosion comes from the front—a mine—and in moments the tank’s left track comes apart and it can no longer move. The enemy overwatch then opens fire on the immobilized vehicle; the soldiers within will be lucky to make it back out alive.

Tracked Tank
(Image credit: Toshinori baba, used under the CC BY-SA 4.0 License)

Tracks have a major problem: they are a single point of failure. If anything goes wrong with the tracks, an armored vehicle will become completely immobile, and in real battlefield conditions this is the last thing you want.

We keep using tracks for one main reason: mobility over soft terrain. With wheels, all of the weight of the vehicle is focused down into tiny contact patches under each wheel, and any time the vehicle travels on softer ground, like sand or mud, the vehicle risks sinking and becoming immobile. Tracks instead spread the weight out over a much larger area, so that even on very soft ground the vehicle doesn’t sink. With tracks, your tank can maneuver through muddy fields and sandy terrain to get an advantage on your enemy to win a fight. Wheels won’t make those maneuvers, and any advantage you could have gotten is gone.

Can we have survivability and mobility at the same time? The Critter project is creating a solution for this. We are developing a new type of mechanism that uses a large number of mechanical undulators instead of a single track on each side of the vehicle. Each individual undulator is very simple, which will make it easy to build and maintain, but the array of undulators provides redundancy that tracks simply don’t have. In addition, the undulators provide much more contact area with the ground than tires, which means they will have most or all of the mobility of tracks, in addition to their increased survivability.

Our device is in a very early stage of development, and a lot of its ultimate capabilities are not yet known. We suspect that our pure-linkage design, which has no gears, belts, or spinning shafts, will turn out to be much more fuel-efficient and wear out much less quickly than tracks. We suspect that our design’s pivot steering will be less damaging to itself and the ground it’s traversing because the undulators lift off for part of their cycle. We suspect that the non-spinning undulators won’t be susceptible to becoming tangled up in and immobilized by concertina wire the way that tracked vehicles can be. The investigation of the mechanism’s capabilities is part of our ongoing efforts to prove out the Critter mechanism and its capabilities.

We invite anyone interested in this technology or its applications to get in touch with us at project.critter@mechadax.com. We’re currently seeking grants and partnerships with organizations that can use advancements in traction technology. If you’re a grant program manager or an organization that benefits from investing in technology, reach out!