CyclEase - A Self Balancing Bicycle for Kids

Learning how to ride a bicycle is a crucial milestone throughout the child’s development stage. The ability to ride a bicycle impacts children’s physical, social, and psychological well-being. Traditional teaching methods that rely on training wheels or balance bikes have shown minimal evolution as they often overlook a vital skill in the early learning stages, impeding the simultaneous development of coordination and balance.

This capstone project introduces an innovative solution: a retrofitting system to transform any bicycle into a self-balancing one. Using a reaction wheel mounted beneath the seat of a bicycle coupled with an LQR controller and the required sensors, the system managed to achieve balance but had poor disturbance rejection. The project was also complemented by a mobile application built using Flutter, Node/Express JS, and Mongo DB. The application allows users to keep track of children’s progress by checking the amount of time they spent over a riding session on a certain balance level, the amount of power the control system is providing, and the speed of the bicycle throughout the duration of the ride. The application also provides control over the system through Bluetooth communication with the controller allowing the dynamic change of the balance level between 3 different levels. Finally, the application made use of the tilt angle of the bicycle being tracked by the controller to offer children a clearer idea of achieving balance by showing them the direction they should rotate the steering wheel, which is towards the direction of the fall.  

Project Details

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