Zoomi Life

Training wheels be damned! You too can ride a bike without having to learn to balance it first.

I don’t remember when I learned to ride a bicycle, but I do remember wrecking mine more than once. In fact, looking back, I’m amazed I managed to get through childhood intact, let alone without any major broken bones or serious debilitating injury. Brain damage doesn’t count, so back off.

Anyway, back to the bike that stands up by itself. While I don’t know that there’s much of a market for this kind of thing, I can see how it’s a great stepping-stone to a lot of other future products. Two-legged robots, two-wheeled rovers, a new version of the Segway Scooter…

The science itself is interesting, for sure. So I’ll skip the usual ribbing I give useless inventions and look at this one purely scientifically. While the goal here is dubious (in their words): “a sophisticated, high-performance bicycle that can serve as a convenient alternative to a small car”, it’s at least a marketable reason to raise money for the endeavor.

The bicycle is being designed at Keio University in Yokohama, Japan. Right now, it looks like a regular bicycle from K-Mart that’s had a lot of scientific-looking equipment and wiring added to it. There’s a motor to control the handlebars, the rear wheel (to “drive”) and a gyro-sensor and LED/camera to give feedback to the system.

It sounds complicated because it is. The idea is that the gyro and camera (which looks at an LED light opposite) give feedback to the computers that control the motors on the bicycle as to the bike’s relative position. This feedback causes the motors to change course to compensate (turn the handlebars, slow down or speed up, etc.).

So far, the bike works great. Of course, there no longer any room for a rider, but this is a test vehicle to make sure the idea itself will actually work. Now that the bicycle can actually ride on its own (on a set of rollers, anyway), they plan to downsize the components and perfect the sensors and software so they can take it out on the streets.

This Post via PhysOrg