Honda Wants You On One Wheel as Well as on Two, or Four, or in the Air...
By John O'Dell September 24, 2009
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Move over, Segway!
Honda, looking to cover all bets, is getting ready to add a one-wheeled, lightweight personal mobility device to a stable that already includes cars, trucks, motorcycles, a jet airplane and outboard motors for boats.
The U3-X mobility device (left) - still experimental - uses Honda-developed "balance control technology" and what the company believes to be "the world's first omni-directional wheel," to enable "riders" to go forward, backward, directly right or left and diagonally, turn in any direction and speed up, slow down or stop merely by leaning the upper body to shift body weight .
Oh, and it's lightweight - under 22 pounds - and electric, powered by a small lithium-ion battery good for an hour of continuous use.
In a neat bit of engineering, Honda made the device at once single- and multi-wheeled, connecting a number (unspecified) of small motor-controlled wheels in a single line then forming that into a single large-diameter wheel.
When the individual small wheels are moving, they enable the device to move side-to-side; when locked into position and rotating as the single large-diameter wheel they enable forward and backward motion, and when working in combination, they make it possible to move diagonally, Honda says.
The company calls it the HOT Drive System (HOT's the acronym for Honda Omni-Traction) and says the balance-based controls were adapted from its ASIMO humanoid robot (left), which can walk, run, climb stairs and, if we know Honda's engineers, quite likely hop on one foot.
To use the device, which looks a bit like a very thick eyeglass frame standing upright, the rider unfolds a seat hidden in the top rim, hangs onto handles built into the seat, places her - or his - feet on foot pegs in the wheel hub, leans forward and goes.
(You can see for yourself in this short video.)
Without mentioning the two-wheeled, stand-up Segway (right) balance-controlled personal transporter that's been on the market since 2002, Honda says that the U3-X places the rider at eye-level with pedestrians (Segway riders tower above the crowd.
Honda's compact device, which enables the user to sit, also would seem to be a more useable people-mover than the Toyota i-REAL mobile chair concept (left), a three-wheeler shown at the '07 Tokyo show, or Toyota's two-wheel, Segway-like Wings concepts (below) shown last year.
The automaker announced the U3-X in a brief press release issued late Wednesday (Thursday morning in Japan) and said it will showcase the devise at the upcoming Tokyo Motor Show, which opens Oct. 24.
No idea when, or whether, it might come to market or, if it does, what it might cost.
All that might come out at the show, though.
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