Ben Cazzolato

Chris Dyer

Kane Fulton

Jonathon Harvey

Evan Schumann

Charles Zhu

Luke Charles Francou

Jack Scott Parsons

Benjamin John Wright

Bo Zhu

EDWARD - Electric Diwheel With Active Rotation Damping

Ben S. Cazzolato, Chris Dyer, Kane Fulton, Jonathon Harvey, Evan Schumann, Charles Zhu, Luke Charles Francou, Jack Scott Parsons, Benjamin John Wright and Bo Zhu

Introduction

The Star Wars movies have had numerous exotic vehicles including the Monowheel (or Wheelbike as called in the movie) and Diwheel (Hailfire Droid) as seen in the images below.

A simple introduction to monowheels and diwheels may be found on Wikipedia.

For more information on monowheels see The Museum of RetroTechnology, which also has information on diwheels. In particular THE DAVID SOUTHALL MONOWHEEL is worth a look at, especially the movies. Kerry Mclean has some very cool monocycles. A more refined monowheel is The Brazilian "Wheelsurf" Monowheel.

The EDWARD Project

This honours project involved the construction of a human operated diwheel. Many diwheels in the past have been human powered or powered by IC engines. This one is purely electric. It has additional functionality lacking in other models, including inbuilt dynamic lateral stability and slosh control to prevent "gerbiling" or tumbling in aggressive braking or acceleration maneuvers. The diwheel will also incorporate a unique feature that will allow the rider to drive the vehicle when "upside down" - keeping the vehicle in its unstable state will be achieved using another controller. The project was partially completed in October 2009. A photograph of the final system is shown below.