A very popular robot form factor these days is the self balancing robot. And the best example is the Segway personal transport with two horizontally mounted wheels.
But has anyone done a robot with two vertically mounted wheels, like a bicycle, that can stay upright? We went to find out.
It turns out that, YES, there are some cool robots with inline wheels! In the Youtube video above, Youtuber aoki2001 shows a great example. The large wheel where the rider would be is what makes sure the vehicle doesn’t topple over. It acts as an inverted pendulum, pushing against the large wheel’s inertia by rotating the motor to which it is attached.
But why use two wheels when you only need one? His unicycle version is below:
Here are some more bicycle robots:
- Self-balancing Bicycle Robot by Youtuber nkmrnrk
- Bicycle robot by Youtuber TOPTHL
- Gyroscopic scooterbot and bikebot by Youtuber niasean
- Reaction Wheel Balanced Robot Bike by Youtuber Reaction Wheel
You can build your own with the guides below:
- Self Balancing Unicycle by ScitechWA
- Self balancing bike
- OneWheeled has a bunch of information on these bots
We also found a humanoid robot that can ride a regular bike!
Consider building your next robotics project with Adafruit Crickit – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express that lets you #MakeRobotFriend using CircuitPython, MakeCode, or Arduino, to build robotics, arts, crafts, audio animatronics, sensors, agriculture/robot farming, physical computing, kinetic sculptures, science experiments, telescope control and much more!
Do you have a self balanced unicycle or bicycle? Post your experience and build in the comments!