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Mecanum Motorcycle

Self balancing all speed vehicle.
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Ordinary bikes and scooters are easy to keep balanced at moderate and high forward speeds, but to stay upright at a stoplight, or to move in reverse, the rider's feet must be applied to the pavement.

The Mecanum Motorcycle (MM) is a self balancing vehicle which is capable of moving both at high speeds, very much like a motorcycle or powered scooter, and at low speeds, vaguely like a segway or hoverboard.

This is accomplished as follows: the rear wheel of the MM is actually a pair of closely set, independently suspended, mecanum wheels.

Each mecanum wheel has a separate motor.

The user's throttle controls overall forward (or rearward!) acceleration of both motors.

A gyroscope, inclinometer, kalman filter, and pid controller automatically control the difference in torque produced by the two motors, in order to automatically balance the vehicle around its roll axis. Note that this is in DIFFERENT from other self-balancing vehicles, which balance around their pitch axis.

If the bike is stationary, and the rider leans to the right, the balancing system will automatically spin one of the mecanum wheels forwards, and the other backwards, in order to move the points of ground contact rightwards, to keep the vehicle under the rider. As a side effect, this will result in the vehicle yawing around the point where the front wheel touches the ground.

Advantages:

Self balancing vehicles look cool.

The transition to feet down to feet up feels awkward, imho, and this obviously eliminates that.

Not having to put your on the ground down means not getting them wet/muddy/snowy in inclement weather.

Being able to steer by leaning, while not moving forwards or backwards, makes it easier to back into a narrow parking space (such as between other bikes).

Being able to motor backwards makes the above task trivial.

Since the rider's feet never need to touch the ground until he wants to get off, the entire bike could be bigger (taller) than the typical limit of a motorcycle.

Disadvantages:

Mecanum wheels are expensive, have high unsprung weight, and I haven't heard of any being built with pneumatic tires. So, vibration.

Also, I'd worry about small objects getting caught in the wheels.

goldbb, Jun 01 2016

Upriser https://upriserrc.com/
Don't need 2 rear wheels... (I would love to see inside the rear wheel of this thing...) [neutrinos_shadow, Jul 07 2020]

[link]






       //Mecanum wheels are expensive, have high unsprung weight, and I haven't heard of any being built with pneumatic tires//. Perfection...
4whom, Jun 02 2016
  

       /Mecanum wheels are.../ Complex, dirt sensitive, always scrubbing a little, low grip...
bs0u0155, Jul 08 2020
  
      
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