Honda's Answer To the Segway

lcreech writes with an excerpt from the Daily Mail's description of a new Segway-style one-person vehicle being shown off by Honda: "The vehicle looks like a very modern unicycle and to ride it you simply lean your weight in the direction you want to go, whether that's forward, backwards or even sideways. It maintains its own balance travelling up to 3.7MPH. Not very fast."

Comments

Re:Not cool enough

[Tacvek]

The real answer is that side to side balance is maintained by precession, (like on a bicycle) combined with some additional balancing by shifting body weight (also critical on a bike). Unlike on a bike, steering based corrections to balance are not present. With sufficiently wide wheel unicycles, wheel geometry becomes the primary side to side stabilzing method.

Steering is completely based on leaning in normal unicycles. Normal bicycles also include an additional steering component (the additional wheel that turns).

Forward and backwards balance is maintained by a combination of of creating a mental feedback loop that causes one to vary cycling speed as necessary to keep the seat roughly upright, along with manually shifting weight forwards and backwards.

For electronic unicycles, steering and side to side balance generally are the same as with manual ones. However the forward and backwards stability does not rely on any weight shifting on the part of the rider, but solely on varying the motor speed as needed to keep the seat upright.

Using a feedback system for keeping the seat upright automatically gives the segway-style speed control on these devices. In order to do more traditional style speed controls requires a more complicated system that varies the angle of the seat that the system tries to maintain as necessary such that the average speed remains as desired. Far more complicated, and not needed, so I've not seen any e-unicycle that does not use segway-style speed control.

There are some tricks that allow steering not based on leaning, and some of the e-unicycle designs I have seen use those, but others use lean based steering which works fine, except for at near stationary speeds, but some of these other systems allow for a smaller turning radius.

Re:Yes, but where is the "RISK OF DEATH" label?

[Salamande]

Hate to break it to you, but Toyota does robotics, as well. Most heavy industries do at least a bit of this stuff, especially in Japan.