Australian Students Build Awesome Diwheel

A couple years ago we did a gallery of concept monowheel vehicles from magazine history which looked sort of like Mr. Garrison’s “IT” from South Park. We never did a similar gallery for diwheel vehicles, and now we don’t have to since a group of mechanical engineering students at The University of Adelaide in Australia have built a working diwheel vehicle more kickass than any others I’ve seen. It’s called an EDWARD (Electric Diwheel With Active Rotation Damping) and has a maximum speed of 25 mph (40 kph). Unlike most diwheels, this one has an all-electric motor and built-in slosh control, swing-up, and inversion control. Yes, it inverts and can be driven by an upside-down rider held in place by a five-point racing harness.

One might think that such a diwheel design could make it hard to keep the rider’s seat level, especially when using the brakes or accelerating (the so-called “gerbiling” effect, in which the rider rocks like a gerbil in an exercise wheel). However, due to “in-built lateral stability and slosh control,” EDWARD allows riders to move in any direction, while their seat stays in a fixed position. The control system calculates and sets the best level of the seat after each movement. [Gizmag]

Wait, they reduced the gerbiling effect?  Well you can count Richard Gere out of your preorder list, then punch me in the face for making the laziest joke ever.  The video and more pictures of this two-wheeled menace are after the jump.  God help me, I’m officially Team EDWARD.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/Uf6Gh-hPDeo?version=3&hl=en_US

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