MIT unveils new 'smart' bike wheel
The clever folks at MIT have developed a smart wheel that could give bicycle riders a 21st century boost.
Unveiled Tuesday at the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, MIT's new Copenhagen wheel is trying to do its part to help the environment by making bike riding easier and more enjoyable.
The wheel's battery can store energy as you step on the brakes and then return that power back to help you climb a hill or boost your speed. A sensor inside the hub measures your effort when you ride. As you pedal forward, the sensor tells the wheel's electric motor to give you a boost. When you hit the brakes, the motor regenerates, slowing you down and recharging the batteries. The goal behind this design is to encourage people to bike farther distances, relying less on gas-guzzling transportation.
"Over the past few years we have seen a kind of biking renaissance, which started in Copenhagen and has spread from Paris to Barcelona to Montreal," said Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Laboratory and the Copenhagen Wheel project, in a statement. "It's sort of like 'Biking 2.0'--whereby cheap electronics allow us to augment bikes and convert them into a more flexible, on-demand system."
(Credit:
Senseable City Lab)
Beyond giving you an energy boost, the wheel has other secrets in its bright red hub. Using sensors and a Bluetooth connection, the wheel can talk to an iPhone mounted on the handlebars. Through an iPhone app, you can check your speed, direction, and distance traveled. The wheel can also monitor traffic conditions and smog and even keep track of your bicycling buddies.
The Copenhagen wheel embeds all the required electronics inside the hub, so no other gadgets need to be added to the bike frame. A special spoking method devised by the team also lets you install the hub on any rim.
Any existing bike can be retrofitted with the wheel. In fact, the MIT team sees it as a plug-and play-device, one that any bike owner should be able to easily install as a back wheel.
The Copenhagen wheel is targeted to hit the market within a year and will be sold by online retailers, consumer electronics vendors, and possibly bike stores. The wheel will cost as much as a standard electronic bike--somewhere between $500 and $1000.
MIT's SENSEable City Lab developed the initial prototype of the wheel for the city of Copenhagen, in cooperation with Italian company Ducati Energia and supported by the Italian Ministry for the Environment. The first orders will likely come from Copenhagen itself, which hopes to retrofit bicycles as replacements for city employee cars.
"The Copenhagen Wheel is part of a more general trend: that of inserting intelligence in our everyday objects and of creating a smart support infrastructure around ourselves for everyday life," said Assaf Biderman, associate director of the project, in a statement.
Lance Whitney wears a few different technology hats--journalist, Web developer, and software trainer. He's a contributing editor for Microsoft TechNet Magazine and writes for other computer publications and Web sites. You can follow Lance on Twitter at @lancewhit. Lance is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and he is not an employee of CNET. 
Too expensive for its implementation.
The city bikes cost around 10 Euro to build. This wheel will be around 50 times MORE expensive than the very bike.
That and the fact that it does not look like vandalism-proof, nor idiot proof.
Two very important aspects for a public implementation.
Still, it really looks like a bo-bo development for harvard-only campuses. Not for normal life, after all.
i would like to hear more info about the motor etc and what its capable of
someone is taking simple existing parts and building a device that can actually encourage people to ride more and moves bikes into the next century, and all you guys have to say is "costs too much" and "not idiot proof"! at least we know the average cnet reader is forward looking and intelligent...
maybe you would all be happier http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10415600-17.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
I don't think Any E-bike solution right now is idiot proof, but those are not the people who are likely to buy it anyway. This is still an New Technology that someday will be widely available. This is a nice step into that from most of the current Technologies in some ways. But till the cost comes down to 250-500 It won't be adopted widely into existing bikes which is what I think the goal of this is; use your current bike, don't worry about plugging it in, don't make it so strong that it would need to be classified as anything other then a bike.
Its a good step forward, but the price point makes it just on the other side of practical over other E-bike solutions.
A bike is supremely simple. Its green because it has NO electronics, its green because it requires almost no maintence, its green because it requires so little materials to produce and own. If people really want to cut their carbon footprint, they need to just ride a bike. This gizmo is not going to to bring millions of new riders to the streets. The Segway was touted as some huge step forward for humanity and nobody bothers with the goofy assed things, yet bikes are as popular as ever. Trust me, I have been riding and working on bikes since before the internet existed. Bikes dont need some stupid gizmo to make them green or attract riders.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot//html/pr2009/pr09_052.shtml
Yeah, right! Like nobody has been riding bikes anywhere else. What a load of arrogant nonsense.
I have a 20 year old bike that I ride all the time. Guess what? I don't live in Copenhagen.
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=DIVIAAAAEBAJ
I've learned a few lessons. You don't want the motor to put extra drag on the bike when coasting to charge batteries. You tend to use the motor a little just to overcome the extra weight and drag caused by the supermagnets in the brushless motor. Lugging an extra ten or fifteen pounds around just so you can use it on occasion turns out to be a huge waste of leg power and a dumb concept overall.
The best use is to combine leg power with battery power simultaneously as a human/electric hybrid.
Here is some video of my bike:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKKvP9wWrlY
Otherwise, this sounds sort of like how a Prius works.
- by Kaboomba December 17, 2009 8:21 AM PST
- My engineering school senior design team considered developing such a device, and ditched the concept to develop what we saw as a more interesting and useful concept with broad applications: human-hydraulic pure series-hybrid with autonomous smart controls.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (41 Comments)But MIT students are so far superior and so much cooler that whatever they do is automatically brilliant.