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In this video I’ll demonstrate an example of gyroscopic stabilization of a two-wheeled vehicle by building a model of the 1903 “Gyro-Monorail“, which was an experimental monorail train car that used control moment gyros (CMGs) to keep it upright on two wheels. This scheme could also be used for stabilizing a bike or motorcycle, though.
The end result is the same as using a reaction wheel, but rather than applying correction torque to a big wheel with a lot of inertia at near-zero RPM, the CMG uses a pair of fast spinning gyros that are tilted back and forth to correct the orientation of the vehicle from gyroscopic torque. The torque produced is a product of the angular momentum of the wheel(s) and the rate of tilt of their rotation axes.
In theory this would work just fine with a single wheel, but if the vehicle experiences a change in