A unicycle is a vehicle that touches the ground with only one wheel. The most common variation has a frame with a saddle, and has a pedal-driven direct-drive. A two speed hub is commercially available for faster unicycling. Unicycling is practiced professionally in circuses, by street performers, in festivals, and as a hobby. Unicycles have also been used to create new sports such as unicycle hockey. In recent years, unicycles have also been used in mountain unicycling, an activity similar to mountain biking or trials.
An electric unicycle is a self-balancing personal transporter with a single wheel. The rider controls speed by leaning forwards or backwards, and steers by twisting or tilting the unit side to side. The self-balancing mechanism uses accelerometers, gyroscopes, and a magnetometer. In 2020, suspension models were introduced by three major manufacturers: Begode, Kingsong and Inmotion.
A single-track vehicle is a vehicle that leaves a single ground track as it moves forward. Single-track vehicles usually have little or no lateral stability when stationary but develop it when moving forward or controlled. In the case of wheeled vehicles, the front and rear wheel usually follow slightly different paths when turning or when out of alignment.
A velocipede is a human-powered land vehicle with one or more wheels. The most common type of velocipede today is the bicycle.
Vehicles that have two wheels and require balancing by the rider date back to the early 19th century. The first means of transport making use of two wheels arranged consecutively, and thus the archetype of the bicycle, was the German draisine dating back to 1817. The term bicycle was coined in France in the 1860s, and the descriptive title "penny farthing", used to describe an "ordinary bicycle", is a 19th-century term.
Countersteering is used by single-track vehicle operators, such as cyclists and motorcyclists, to initiate a turn toward a given direction by momentarily steering counter to the desired direction. To negotiate a turn successfully, the combined center of mass of the rider and the single-track vehicle must first be leaned in the direction of the turn, and steering briefly in the opposite direction causes that lean. The rider's action of countersteering is sometimes referred to as "giving a steering command".
A motorized bicycle is a bicycle with an attached motor or engine and transmission used either to power the vehicle unassisted, or to assist with pedalling. Since it sometimes retains both pedals and a discrete connected drive for rider-powered propulsion, the motorized bicycle is in technical terms a true bicycle, albeit a power-assisted one. Typically they are incapable of speeds above 52 km/h (32 mph), however in recent years larger motors have been built, allowing bikes to reach speeds of upwards of 72 km/h.
A Jyrobike is a bicycle with a special front wheel designed to make balancing easier. It was manufactured and sold by a company of the same name.
A dicycle is a vehicle with two parallel wheels, side by side, unlike single-track vehicles such as motorcycles and bicycles, which have two wheels inline. Originally used to refer to devices with large wheels and pedals, the term is now used in relation to powered self-balancing scooters with smaller wheels and no pedals such as the Segway PT and the self-balancing hoverboard.
The Uno is a novel self-balancing electric motorcycle using two wheels side by side. The Uno III adds a third wheel that allows it to transform into a tricycle.
Ben Gulak is a Ukrainian Canadian inventor best known for creating the Uno, an eco-friendly, electric-powered vehicle that bears a resemblance to a motorized unicycle. The vehicle had its first public unveiling in 2008, and was awarded a Top-10 prize on Popular Science's list of 2008 Invention Awards. Gulak founded the Massachusetts-based company BPG Motors, which has also developed a design for the DTV Shredder, a portable all-terrain vehicle with the handlebars of a Segway and treads similar to those of a tank.
A RIOT wheel is a one-wheeled vehicle, or monowheel. Housing a motor and counterweight inside a giant wheel, the driver sits on a platform that extends out in front of the device. This is in contrast to the typical monowheels and their long history, where the rider sits inside the wheel.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to bicycles:
The Dynasphere is a monowheel vehicle design patented in 1930 by John Archibald Purves FRSE from Taunton, Somerset, UK.
The Roper steam velocipede was a steam-powered velocipede built by inventor Sylvester H. Roper of Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts, United States sometime from 1867 to 1869. It is one of three machines which have been called the first motorcycle, along with the Michaux-Perreaux steam velocipede, also dated 1867–1869, and the 1885 Daimler Reitwagen. Historians disagree over whether the Roper or the Michaux-Perreaux came first. Though the Reitwagen came many years later than the two steam cycles, it is often labeled as the "first motorcycle" because there is doubt by some experts whether a steam cycle should meet the definition of a motorcycle.
A two-mass-skate bicycle (TMS) is a theoretical model created by a team of researchers at Cornell University, University of Wisconsin-Stout, and Delft University of Technology to show that it is neither sufficient nor necessary for a bike to have gyroscopic effects or positive trail to be self-stable. The two-mass and skates aspects of the model were chosen to eliminate design parameters so that the nine that remain, the locations of the masses and the steering geometry, could be more easily analyzed. Instead of full inertia tensors, the total mass of the bike is reduced to just two point masses, one attached to the rear frame and one attached to the front fork. Instead of rotating wheels, the non-holonomic ground contacts are provided by small-radius skates.
The Inmotion SCV is a series of self-balancing, sensor controlled, battery-powered dicycles and electric unicycles from Inmotion Technologies of Shenzhen, China.
