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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."
Until I get this I'm not satisfied.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
This place: http://focusdesigns.com/ has a working version that you can buy today, apparently. It's also more than twice as fast at 10 MPH.
Actually, a lot of people have done this before. Just google "self balancing unicycle" or "powered unicycle".
Everything I say is a lie. Except that... and that... and that, and that, and that, and that... and that.
that was my first thought... an awesome office chair.
Second thought was that it will work some muscles that aren't normally used.. with all that leaning moving and stuff...
This is just a proof of concept project. Honda encourages engineers to pursue "pet" projects in mobility. The ones with promise are given more resources. Sometimes they even become actual products, like Honda Jet.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
The single wheel on the U3-X is made up of many tiny motor-controlled wheels, packed inside the bigger wheel, allowing the device to swerve in any direction.
A wheel made of up of smaller wheels is one of the classic bad ideas of robotics. Back in the 1980s, when robot motion planning software barely worked, many mobile robots were "holonomic" or "omni-drive": they could move in any direction without turning first. One of the popular geometries was three big wheels on axes 120 degrees apart (that robot is in a display case in the lobby of the computer science building at Stanford), with each big wheel composed of little wheels around the rim. This mechanism can execute any rotation or translation.
The problem is that the little wheels only work on hard, flat terrain. Shag rugs are a problem. Grass, dirt, and mud, no way.
I commuted to work by unicycle for several years and have done hundreds of miles in total. Modern unicycles have come a long way from the old days of a circus exhibit. There are lot of people who ride very long distances on them. A unicycle won't suit most people for commuting but it actually has more plus points than you'd think ...
* Lighter weight than a bike, relatively easy to pick up and carry, or wheel along.
* Takes less space than a bike to store indoors.
* Cheaper than a bike of equivalent quality.
* Once you're skilled you can "idle" on the spot (or just hop occasionally to shift the thing back under your centre of mass) so you may not have to put a foot down when waiting in traffic or at lights.
* Potentially very mechanically simple.
* Good exercise, including for your core muscles due to the postural component of keeping balanced.
It's also a good attention grabber, if you like that sort of thing. I've observed that a lot of geeks, particularly computer geeks, seem to like unicycling. My guess is that this is because, relative to a bike, it requires a high degree of mental engagement but in a non-intellectual way. So you get to exercise your brain but in a way which distracts you from the pressures of logical thought processes.
There are some commuting unicycles here:
http://www.unicycle.com/shopping/shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=1&subcat=7&cat=Commuter
Note that handlebars are available, which allows experienced riders to take some weight of their "bits". Combined with modern saddles, a unicycle is a lot less punishing to your nether regions than you'd expect, though you obviously still need to take care!
Finally, at the high end of the price range, there are unicycles with the Schlumpf (and Kris Holm-Schlumpf) hub-based gearing system. No exposed gearing but you can get something like a 1.5:1 increase in gear ratio, allowing you go go much faster whilst still having the wheel be small and light. In some ways I'd think this would be the best urban commuting unicycle for experienced riders.
There are clear disadvantages to a unicycle to but I figure some folks here might be interested anyhow. Because an unpowered unicycle has made such a good commuting vehicle for me I wouldn't be surprised if an electrical one is actually more practical than you'd expect.
[if anyone wants to find out more, the rec.sport.unicycling newsground, also available as a forum http://unicyclist.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=3 will be able to answer your questions or you can just reply to me here - it's arguably even on topic!]
Bicycles and roller blades give you a work out. Cars *have* contributed to the obesity epidemic. Obesity is inversely related to the availability of sidewalks in an area. Segways are too dorky to become popular enough to make a difference.
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Can it climb stairs?
Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, had invented a wheelchair that was capable of climbing up stairs. The problem was, the wheelchair was too expensive to start to produce because of the small quantities of unique parts needed at first. So Kamen wanted to come up with something that A) was made from the same parts of the wheelchair and B) he could sell for a lot of money, thereby driving the price of the wheelchair down. That's how the Segway was born. People give Kamen a lot of crap for the lack of success of the Segway to revolutionize transportation, but that was never it's goal, it was just a high priced item to be sold to a niche market so that the price of a more useful humanitarian item could be driven down.