03-11-2016, 11:47 PM
The advantages of ball-shaped tyres are legion. Using them, an autonomous vehicle could move in any direction at any angle at any time, spinning the vehicle in place to turn around, making completely parallel lane changes, or crab-rolling sideways to parallel park in a tiny space after dropping its passengers. These manoeuvres are impossible to execute using a human/steering-wheel interface (which requires forward momentum to execute a turn), but with a robot in charge of a spherical tyre, just about anything is possible.