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The Segway Human Transporter (HT) is efficient where urban driving currently is not. How so?
Cars are perfect machines for a discreet mission. Their performance is optimized at 50, 60, 70 miles an hour. They carry you and your whole family and keep you warm in the winter and cool in the summer and move you between cities. It’s fun to do that, it’s efficient to do that. Then you put a car in the middle of a city, with one person in it. That one person is trying to get one mile or two at a speed much less than the distance he or she wants to travel. It’s absurd. Especially since half of all car trips in the U.S. are less than a few miles. With cars creeping along causing congestion and pollution, they are no longer efficient. And with half of the human population now living in cities, there has to be another way to travel short distances. What if you could give the pedestrian, with a Segway HT, the ability to glide along the sidewalk at 8, 9, or 10 miles an hour? You would have given them a safe option that is not only cleaner, but also more efficient. And, by the way, a lot of fun!
Dean, what is it about a Segway HT that makes people smile when they step on it?
When you first climb aboard a Segway HT, you feel like a kid when he stands up for the first time. You’re bewildered. As you think forward, the machine starts to move forward. As you feel yourself wanting to step back, it intuits this and reverses. The experience of being on a Segway HT isn’t really like anything else. It’s like watching yourself learn to acquire the capability to balance.
Seeing that there are no brakes, engine, throttle, gearshift or steering wheel, I assume you would agree with Arthur C. Clarke’s statement, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
I not only agree with that statement, I would say that we work hard to live up to that standard with most of our projects. If a client doesn’t say, “Wow, that’s amazing!” I assume we haven’t succeeded yet. Building the iBOT 3000 Mobility System, an enhanced advance on the wheelchair that uses cutting-edge robotics to allow the disabled to stand up, look their colleagues in the eye and walk up a flight of stairs is one very vivid example. Building medical equipment so that people can dialyze themselves at home instead of living three nights of every week in an iron lung in a hospital room is another. We dedicate ourselves to projects that significantly change people’s lives. (more…)
