Technology
The dynamics of the Segway PT are similar to a classic control problem, the inverted pendulum. The Segway PT (PT is an initialism for personal transporter while the old suffix HT was an initialism for human transporter) has electric motors powered by Valence Technology phosphate-based lithium-ion batteries which can be charged from household current. It balances with the help of dual computers running proprietary software, two tilt sensors, and five gyroscopic sensors developed by BAE Systems' Advanced Technology Centre. The servo drive motors rotate the wheels forwards or backwards as needed for balance or propulsion. The rider controls forward and backward movement by leaning the Segway relative to the combined center of mass of the rider and Segway, by holding the control bar closer to or farther from their body. The Segway detects the change in the balance point, and adjusts the speed at which it is balancing the rider accordingly. On older models, steering is controlled by a twist grip on the left handlebar, which simply varies the speeds between the two motors, rotating the Segway PT (a decrease in the speed of the left wheel would turn the Segway PT to the left). Newer models enable the use of tilting the handle bar to steer.
Read more about this topic: Segway PT
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)
“The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)