Huawei Engineer's Open Source Autonomous Bike Rides Itself — and Balances While Standing Still, Too
Inspired by an accident, the XUAN-Bike includes a depth-sensing camera, LIDAR, and a reaction wheel to keep it upright.
An engineer working for Chinese tech giant Huawei has shown off a prototype self-driving vehicle, but it's swapped four wheels for two: It's a bicycle, capable of keeping itself upright on even the smallest of surfaces.
"This is one of the most hard-core projects I have done recently," writes Zhi "David" Huijun of the XUAN-Bike project, which was brought to our attention by Designboom. "The development process took four months intermittently (although basically I was only available on weekends), but I encountered a lot of pitfalls during the period."
That project: An autonomous bicycle, upgraded with two brushless motors, a steering system, a lithium battery originally developed for model aircraft, and a computing system linked to a sensor package made up of depth-sensing camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, and LIDAR. Control is provided through a combination of a control computer dubbed Atlas Pi and a control unit based on an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller.
As well as being able to steer itself, the newly-electrified bike has another trick up its sleeve: It can balance even while standing still. The secret behind this trick: A motor attached to a metal reaction wheel, which can be accelerated or decelerated as required to keep the bike upright even in the absence of a rider.
Interestingly, Huijun has chosen to release the design files for the bike — the creation of which was inspired by an accident on a less-smart bicycle — on GitHub, under an unspecified license.