Recent news coming out from china is that an employee from heavy, the country’s biggest tech firm, has developed a new kind of autonomous vehicle. But hold your horses, this time the new autonomous vehicle is not a smart car or an electric car. Rather, the device is simply a bicycle, however, this one can stand, balance, and travel by itself.
Zhihui Jun, who is the employee in question, claims to have come up with the idea after falling off a non-modified bicycle and wanting it to stand up by itself. And the crazy idea for an autonomous bicycle was thus born. The prototype showcased by the engineer looks like an e-bike that is powered by a lithium-ion battery rated to last 2 or 3 hours.
But the bicycle also has been reportedly enhanced with all the sensors necessary for the bicycle equivalent of a self-driving car. this includes accelerometers, gyroscopes, and LiDAR scanners, and of course, the vehicle also has the AI to control the hardware and confer features such as obstacle avoidance and automatic route-following.
However, the main question is as to whether the bike could manage to stand on its own? Zhihui Jun claims that it is indeed possible to make the vehicle stand on its own, albeit with the help of a disk-like control module connected to precision sensors that can sense the slightest tilting in the 3D-printed frame. This will dictate the minute changes in balance to compensate, and keep the bicycle upright.
The result sounds far-fetched, however, the same method has indeed been previously used before to help satellites maintain their orientations in orbit. It also stated that the arrangement of the bicycle is controlled using a Huawei Ascend 310 processor. For now, we don’t see any indications that the OEM intends to mass-produce and release the self-cycling e-bike.
