A bicycle built for no one
For those of us who have been out of school for awhile, it is often interesting to see the high degree of technical sophistication brought to bear on student projects these days. Several noteworthy efforts were on the NI Week exhibition floor, including this self balancing, remotely piloted bicycle developed by students at Tsinghua University in China. It was pretty weird to see a video of this thing tooling around a track all by itself. As explained by Ph.D. student Stasinopoulos Sotirios, students put a gyroscope sensor on the back of the bike, rather than near the center of gravity, because a location near the bike center didn’t generate enough of a torque signal to stabilize the vehicle. It took about seven months to perfect the stabilization algorithm. The main parameter the bike senses is the roll angle. A dc brushless motor (from Maxon) moves the handle bars through a 9:1 gearbox to balance and steer the bike. There are two other motors, one for braking, the other for forward motion. A controller from NI sitting on the bike handles the processing. An operator controls the bike using an ordinary remote as might be used for RC planes.
Filed Under: IoT • IIoT • Internet of things • Industry 4.0, Wireless • 5G and more
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