"Commander Kinsey" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 20:47:28 -0000, Romera Etafodor
wrote:

On 1/24/2019 3:07 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
I tried one, once, I couldn't stay on it. I see countless Youtube
videos of people falling off them. But why? If you are about to fall
over backwards, shouldn't it feel the tilt of your feet and simply roll
under your centre of gravity? It should
be impossible to fall off.


Half the people on the planet are below average IQ so are incapable of
riding a self balancing scooter.

For the double-digit IQ crowd there is the Teknique HD6 powered
wheelchair.

https://www.hoveround.com/mobility-s...y/teknique-hd6 .

My point was why does the rider need any skill whatsoever? The device
should move under your centre of gravity automatically. Perhaps they have
to be calibrated, and people falling off are borrowing someone else's of a
different height or weight?

I wonder whether a lot of the problems with people falling off are that they
are scared when they tilt too far, and instinctively try to correct by
adjusting their position instead of standing still and letting the scooter
do the adjustments to keep you level, or else they panic and jump off.

I probably went through all those stages in the first 30 mins of getting on
a Segway for the first time. But after a while you develop and refine the
muscle memory to work out just how much you need to move to stay level and
not to "fight the machine" - similar to the skills you acquire when you
learn to ride a bike.

I'd be interested to see if now, two years after my one and only chance to
ride a Segway, I'd take less time to adjust to it again. Is it like riding a
bike, I wonder: once you've learned, it always comes back to you, even if
you haven't ridden for many years.

As regards riding a different Segway, yes, I found it does make a
difference. My wife and I were given different sizes/models of Segway,
appropriate to our height and weight, and even after I was pretty damn good
on the one I'd been given, I had great difficulty when I borrowed my wife's
to try it - presumably different sensitivity and amount of motor correction
that I would have to adjust to.

It's a skill that has to be learned: it's a myth that you can get on one
having never ridden it before and immediately manage to stay on in all
circumstances. But it doesn't take long to acquire the skill. The route that
our tour guide took us on started with straight, level paths, then gradually
introduced gradients (it was great fun to lean right forward and go bombing
up a hill to the Roman Lighthouse in Corunna), and by then end of our time,
he took us through streets in the town centre where there were lots of
people that we had to avoid. Going over cobbles and raised manhole covers
was "interesting". No pedestrians were harmed :-)