A Minimalist Approach to Rolling Wheels

Abstract

In 1960, G. B. Robison discovered the general equations relating roads and wheels, where either can have an unusual shape (e.g., the square wheel rolls smoothly on a catenary). But he used some inobvious assumptions regarding the meaning of rolling. Here we derive the equations for the road appropriate for a given wheel using only the single assumption that rolling occurs with no slipping. We do not require that the wheel be differentiable, so this allows the construction of a wheel-road pair when the wheel is a continuous nowhere differentiable function.