I'm still not sold on it's practicality though. The first thing I wonder is how it goes up and down hills. One can only wonder what happens to the Segway after cresting a steep hill.
And while it needs outside power for the balancing mechanism, apparently it changes some of the potential energy of a fall forward into kinetic energy..i.e., motion.
Wouldn't that imply the same principle could be applied to a stationary device to possibly generate power, close to a perpetual motion machine, with frictional losses being the limiting factor.
Of course in Segway a human reaction/reflex is part of the circuit, and aparently some potential energy is derived from that relationship. In other words you can't hang a weight at the end of a string and expect it to produce power/motion.
If you could, why not replace the weight with a spring or small, efficient engine to produce the input, then let Segway's gyro's crank generators.
All in all it looks like a clever device, something useful in a controlled environment like a factory, but NOT something that's going to be running around city streets. Could you imagine a bunch of skateboard dudes flying along on these things through a crowd?
In fact persopnally, as a skateboarder from back in the early 60's I'd rather hang ten.
prisoner6
No it implies it is the vehicle which takes you the short distance between two points.