CSAIL undergraduate student Stephan Boyer can often be seen zooming around campus on a partially self-balancing electric unicycle he built called the “Bullet.” Boyer’s invention is making headlines this week in publications like The Huffington Post and The Daily Mail.
The unicycle keeps the rider from falling forwards or too far backwards, and allows the rider to acelerate or brake by leaning forwards or backwards. The Bullet, which Boyer says operates like a Segway, can hit speeds of up to 15 miles per hour and can go five miles on a single charge. Boyer uses it as his primary mode of transportation at MIT.
Boyer is an undergraduate in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and is working on the Julia Project, a high performance programming language for scientific computing, at CSAIL.