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Video: Chinese students invent bike that rides itself

Self-balancing – it doesn’t clamber onto its own saddle or owt

There’s often an April Fools’ Day vibe to stories about riderless bikes. Google’s self-driving bicycle was one such story, but a team of students at Tsinghua University has done it for real. Here at road.cc we are, generally speaking, very much pro cyclist – that’s kind of the point of the website – but this is nevertheless quite an impressive feat.

The team has fitted an electric bicycle with steering and speed control. While a riderless bike will steer and right itself given enough momentum, this only succeeds in keeping it upright. It takes a lot more to achieve the same thing while also directing it where you want it to go.

In the video (from 2015), we see the lonely steed circling a track, bumping over small obstacles and riding on (not especially) rough terrain.

Quite why Tsinghua University is working on this project is beyond us. They don’t appear to have a shortage of cyclists in the area. The university recommends using a bicycle for on-campus transportation, and adds: “The morning bicycle jam on the roads to the classrooms has always been a sight to behold.”

Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.

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5 comments

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bigshape | 8 years ago
0 likes

pretty cool, but still nowhere near as good as the cycling robot...
https://youtu.be/mT3vfSQePcs

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bikebot | 8 years ago
0 likes

I'm sure I could think of all kinds of valid engineering questions to ask them, but mostly I want to know why they left the pedals on?

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Leviathan | 8 years ago
1 like

Which will kill us all first, hunter/seeker drones from Dune, or motorbike terminators from T4:the-one-in-the-desert-with-Bruce-Wayne-Chekov-and-that-dude-from-Avatar?

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tritecommentbot | 8 years ago
0 likes

I soooo need this. Just to freak the neighbours out.

 

Send it out once a month at 3am with a speaker putting out satanic droning. angel

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kamoshika | 8 years ago
0 likes

This is the future of Boris bikes!! Pick one up from a dock, ride it to where you want to be, then set it free to its own way back to the nearest dock! No more having to find a dock with a space to return it to

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