09-05-2002, 09:04 AM | #1 |
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More on the Gyrover (DS monowheel)
I love the possibilities of this design.
Perpetual Wheelie Carnegie Mellon's Gyrover Innovator: H. Benjamin Brown, Jr. For the past several years, people strolling around the Carnegie Mellon campus have delighted in watching a hubcap-size wheel skip across the quad. Nothing seems to stop it. Downhill or up, the little wheel keeps going. It hurdles bumps, swerves around obstacles (usually), and runs into things, bouncing off harmlessly (usually). Even when it falls on its side, it manages to pick itself up: it gyrates slowly and wobbles around on its rim, rising higher and higher until it's upright again, like a coin balanced on edge. Then it tilts, turns, and scoots away. This frisky wheel is, of course, a radio-controlled robot. A four-pound gyroscope concealed inside spins at 12,000 rpm and holds the wheel upright, whether it's rolling or not. Two internal motors drive it uphill and tilt the gyro to make the wheel turn, or even right itself after falling. This happens to be a serious rover, but where did the idea come from? "When I was a teenager I worked in a gas station," says Benjamin Brown, Gyrover's inventor. "I rolled tires outside and was impressed that they didn't fall over--there was this inherent stability." Brown continued similar recreations as a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, going so far as to build a gyroscopically stabilized bicycle. Then the Japanese construction firm Shimizu asked him to come up with a new concept for lunar exploration. The jeeplike rover driven on the moon by Apollo astronauts seemed vulnerable to tipping; in such low gravity the wheels bounced crazily over bumps and ruts, even at slow speeds. What could be simpler and better, Brown thought, than a robot shaped like a tire, a unicycle stabilized by a gyroscope? The faster it went, the more stable it would be. Brown had the first Gyrover, a steel bowl with a gyro and controls from a model airplane, running in two months. The second version, he says, "had a lot more engineering"--a fat fabric tire, the gyro enclosed in a vacuum. The latest version, which contains a computer for autonomous control, was completed in April, though Brown continues to tinker with the controls. On the moon, he says, a 30-foot inflatable model "would just roll over large obstacles." With cameras looking out the sides and radar scanning the ground, it would be ideal, he thinks, for mapping and surveying large areas. A more conventional robot could creep along behind, for claws-on exploration or collecting samples. "If you try to make Gyrover an all-purpose robot," Brown says, "sort of with arms sticking out, you lose the basic beauty of the design." |
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