The screw drive concept comes from the Ford SnowMotor, from the 1920s.[1] Works on snow, works in mud, works in marshes, works in sand, works in water, fails on paved roads. The USSR built some screw drive trucks.
A slightly improved approach is being used for some modern robots.[1]
If you have independent split screws on each side, you can drive the thing sideways on hard ground and still steer. Sort of.
It's not clear that this offers any advantage for how complex it is. The claimed advantage is being able to trade off speed for efficiency, but curves of both are fairly flat. For mud, at max efficiency it can travel at 25 mm/s and at max angle 32ish mm/s with an error bar of 10 mm/s.
That being said, efficiency does not seem to be good compared to wheels. At best, it's 0.1, which sort of corresponds to a rolling resistance of 0.9(higher is worse). Cars have a rolling resistance on soft sand of 0.2-0.4[0]. Of course this high efficiency was on mud, but their efficiency for sand is so close to zero I can't determine it without counting pixels in the graph.
See https://www.vinerobots.org/ which look (and work) like a p3s. National labs are developing things that look like an appendage of a tentacle monster and go into a hole at a nuclear fuel facility and look for stolen plutonium.
YOShInOn (my agent) knows that HN readers aren't that likely to upvote arXiv papers about robots but we post them anyway because I think they are cool and YOShInOn models my preferences. That's why you don't see very many on the front page.
Some people annoy everybody by posting a link to HN to get on some wait list for a product that might never get released.
This is how I annoy people.
A search for "Yoshinon" on the search box at the bottom of the page will find a lot more, search on Google and you might find a picture of a girl in a strange raincoat (looking close it doesn't look like it would keep out the rain if it was a normal raincoat but that raincoat is magic and stops antitank missiles so I'm sure she stays dry somehow) who has a hand puppet. My YOShInOn is named after that hand puppet.
There will be a blog post someday. I made a big change to the ingestion system for that which I have been stressing a long time that might free up my headspace for that... Or maybe give me more opportunities to hack on it.
My YOShInOn's main model predicts if I will be interested in article. It has secondary models that predict if an article will get >10 votes on HN and another that predicts the comments/votes ratio.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n35EpnI03pY