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A self-balancing electric bicycle that can turn corners could be used by older people, those with balance issues or people learning to ride.

Jiaming Xiong at Peking University in Beijing, China, and his colleagues added gyroscopic sensors to a standard electric bicycle. These can detect when the bike starts to lean and trigger it to steer into the direction of the fall in order to stabilise. The bicycle goes faster when needed to keep itself vertical.

鈥淯nder proper control parameters, it can go infinitely far, as long as the battery is not exhausted,鈥� he says.

At rest, the bicycle is inherently unstable, but once it reaches a critical speed it can maintain its course and even make turns. Xiong believes the prototype could eventually lead to autonomous machines that can make deliveries, and suggests it is lighter and better able to fit through narrow gaps than a four-wheeled robot doing the same task. But further work would be needed to stop it falling over once it reaches its destination and stops, he says.

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Long-standing theories on bicycle physics have been undermined in recent years, such as the idea that the wheels鈥� rotation provides a stablising gyroscopic effect that keeps bikes upright. This was disproved by experiments by Arend Schwab at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and his colleagues, which added counter-rotating wheels to bicycles and showed that they remain stable.

Schwab is working on a bicycle with similar electronic steering technology, which he aims to use to assist human riders in maintaining stability. 鈥淲ith this electricity on board, we can do a lot of things. We now can put a steering motor on and balance actively, or assist in the balance,鈥� he says.

Reference: arXiv,听