I love bicycles. I enjoy riding them. I enjoy working on them. In particular, I like rehabbing and restoring old bicycles. There's something about bringing a machine back to life that may have otherwise ended up in the landfill that fills me with pride. Plus there's a certain level of cool that vintage bicycles, especially 60s and 70s road bikes and roadsters, possess that is rarely seen in modern bikes. Something about the clean lines and simplicity of the thing I guess.
The machine that we now recognize as the bicycle has been around for a little over a century. And the physics of how the bike works and how it stays upright are fairly well understood. First of all, the bicycle has a particular geometry with respect to the position of steering that helps to keep it upright. Enhancing this effect are the rotation of the relatively large wheels of the bicycle. This rotational motion provides an inertial force or gyroscopic effect, much like the tail rotor of a helicopter, and allows the bicycle to stay upright even when it is not actually going anywhere. These phenomena are well studied and are fairly easy to understand.
But not so fast. A research group has eliminated the gyroscopic effects of the bicycle's wheels by adding a counter-rotating wheel and altered the traditional geometry of the bicycle by playing around with its form and shape. And what they get is a bicycle-like vehicle that is able to stay upright on its own, as long as it moves greater than a particular speed. Pretty mind-blowing stuff. You can see a video of it in action here, and also read more about the study and the conclusions. The research group believes that the ability of their machine to stay upright can be attributed to the fact that, like a traditional bicycle, the machine has a tendency to steer into its fall, keeping it from completely falling over when it begins to tip. But this is just a hypothesis. So the study has added a bit of mystery and intrigue to what was considered the ordinary, plain-old bicycle.
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