1a. Principles & Practices¶
Assignment¶
- Plan and sketch a potential final project
Learning outcomes
- Communicate an initial project proposal
Inspiration¶
My absolute favorite toy when I was a little kid was this remote control toy motorcycle, the Kawasaki Super Gyro Ninja. The “super gyro stabilizer” technology claimed to give it “unbelievable balance and control” but while it helped keep it from falling over at low speeds, I was slightly dissapointed as a kid that it did not completely balance it upright at standstill.
“The hottest R/C on two wheels!”
Original TV commercial from 1996
As an adult, I had the notion of taking it apart to understand how it worked and make a better version myself that actually self-balanced even while not moving. What better time to do it than as my electronics-based final project for Fab Academy 2022!
I opened it up and found that the gyro is actually hardlinked to the steering, essentially acting as a third wheel that constantly spun, providing some additional rotational inertia that pointed in the same direction as the front wheel. This indeed would help balance the toy motorcycle at low speeds, but without a separate control system to actively control the gyro pitch, it would not help balance at standstill. Sounds like a job for a microcontroller!
Research¶
The company that made the Kawasaki Super Gyro Ninja has since gone out of business unfortunately. Since then, the closest toy to come close was the Ducati Panigale Upriser. The Ducati toy achieved complete self-balancing by using an omniwheel for it’s rear wheel.
2019 Commerical for Upriser Ducati Panigale V4 S RC Stunt Bike
While impressive, I feel it’s a bit of cheating with an omniwheel. Real motorcycles don’t have omniwheels! It would make no sense at high speeds, but I guess it’s fine as a toy…
Back to gyroscopes-
Gyros used in this way are known as control moment gyroscopes. They use the force of gyroscopic precession to induce torque in a desired direction with gimbal(s), creating balance or orientation control in such applications as:
- Satellites in space
- Reducing swaying on boats
- Keeping a motorcycle upright
Previous concepts of a two-wheeled vehicle balanced by gyros have already been patented by Ford and Harley-Davidson.
Disregarding patentability and future commercial applications for now, I just think it would be a fun and cool project to build a true self-balancing RC motorcycle toy (with gyros and not cheating with an omniwheel!). Something like what YouTuber James Bruton made:
Maker YouTuber James Bruton’s Inline Wheel Self-Balancing Gyro Robot
Gyroscopic precession is a “weird” concept in physics where results are not intuitive. It takes a bit to wrap your head around what’s happening in 3D space with orthogonal angular momentum and torque vectors. Here’s my notes to summarize the application of gyros in this new toy and how I would break the experimentation into development spirals:
The layout of components and electronics would be similar to the Kawasaki Super Gyro Ninja from 1996 with the key difference being the stabilizing gyro is not bound to the front wheel, but instead can move independently with a servo controlled by a microcontroller.
The microcontroller would continuously take input from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) which tells it what angle the toy motorcycle is leaning left or right. It can then take this value, plug it into a proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller, determine the corrective action to take with the gyro and execute it by outputting a control command to the servo in charge of changing the gyro’s pitch.
In a further spiral, I would like to use the IMU built into smartphones to make it part of a handheld controller for the RC toy. Imagine as you tilt the controller, the motorcycle leans with it!
Motivation¶
Electric vehicles (EV) in general are a critical piece in the fight against climate change, and quite a few companies are working on electric motorcycles today. I hypothesize that one barrier to wider adoption of these highly energy-efficient electric motorcycles is the average consumer’s lack of confidence in balancing a two-wheeled vehicle. One startup, Lit Motors has been developing a solution with self-balancing gyros. In this nascent EV industry, there’s for sure more opportunities and space for new entrants to provide value with products and/or technology that hasn’t been invented yet.
Additionally, dynamical balancing is just an interesting engineering problem to solve.