Attention Makers

CATEGORY: INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION

E-Board

MAKERS: Rahul Choudary

Our problem statement addresses three scenarios: -> Students in college campuses, taking long tiring walks to and from various departments, for every other lecture and returning tired after the hectic day. -> School students commuting between home and school walking or bicycling. -> Office commuters returning dull and frustrated on mass transport vehicles in industrial campuses, sacked like potato bags. We thought - can't there be a solution which is fun to ride, faster, more energizing besides being compact, low cost and does not leave an environmental footprint? Then we came up with E-board. The design makes it a fun-filled leisurely experience, while also ensuring certain health benefits like improvement in balance, patience, stress relief etc. It will be designed in a way such that it will be compact, lightweight and runs on battery. It would require weight shifting to make turns and an initial push to provide the starting torque. This drastically reduces the large initial in rush of current to motor. E-board is a 6 wheel skateboard - 4 regular and 2 customized wheels on central axis mounted on a BLDC motor. The two special wheels behave similar to castor wheel allowing full 360 rotation. Special slip ring arrangement would be provided for powering the motors to make translational motion possible. The control system would be a closed loop PI based speed control over damped system to reduce the chances of jerks, during speed change. Also, the system would have a regenerative braking system to increase the efficiency at the same time, making electrical braking more reliable and responsive. Regenerative system activates during braking and coasting, when detected by a gyro sensor. Ultrasonic proximity sensors to avoid the risk to collision for the safety of the rider, may be installed at the front side. The rider controls the speed and braking using a wireless RF based remote stick, while steering control is by weight shifting on E board. The e board would tentatively operate safely up to 20 km/hr, maximum speed limit will be programmed for the safety of the rider. The initial target audience of our project are college students, residing in campuses, as the roads are smoother with less traffic. Along with a number of charging stations at strategic locations in the campus, we can establish a sustainable transport system- which promises to be clean, ecofriendly and fun. This project is scalable, with increase in popularity we would like school teen to benefit from our project and finally bring it on to the streets when it has grown safe enough. Development of such electric boards has changed the way cities like San Francisco, think about transportation. However the existing technology is really expensive and not available to the common people in India. We aim to bring this cost down to an extent that it matches the cost of a bicycle, thus motivating and attracting the Indian masses to try out the next generation of skateboards.

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