James Bruton's Omni Wheel Bicycle

Omni wheels are a rather strange contraption at first glance, as they feature another smaller set of wheels positioned at 90º around their circumference. You may have seen them used in robots, in groups of three or more, to allow sliding movement in any direction. By themselves, however, they’re generally fairly useless. James Bruton, however, was actually able to successfully use a single omni wheel on the front of a bicycle, creating rather strange two-wheeled contraption.

The bike, if you can even call it that, uses a standard back end, but implements a heavily modified fork to position the bike-wheel-sized Omni wheel at 90º to the traditional orientation. Forward travel is accomplished by rolling on the smaller (skateboard) wheels. The larger wheel can be locked in place for a rather traditional ride, but being constructed by Bruton, it doesn’t stop there.

The omni-bike also implements a switchable self-balancing system controlled by a Teensy 4.1 and MPU 6050, which utilizes a brushless DC motor (BLDC) to pull the larger wheel back and forth to keep it upright. The effect here is that when Bruton leans right, the bicycle’s front end slides right to compensate, and that he’s able to stop and turn in place without doing a tail-whip or other shenanigans. The other consequence is that controlling it in self-balancing mode is quite counterintuitive, requiring him to largely put aside how he'd normally control a bicycle.

The build and testing process is laid out in the video below, and the design is on GitHub if you want to examine things in more detail.