Personal transporter

A personal transporter (also powered transporter, electric rideable, personal light electric vehicle, personal mobility device, etc.) is any of a class of compact, mostly recent (21st century), motorised micromobility vehicle for transporting an individual at speeds that do not normally exceed . They include electric skateboards, kick scooters, self-balancing unicycles and Segways, as well as gasoline-fueled motorised scooters or skateboards, typically using two-stroke engines of less than displacement. Many newer versions use recent advances in vehicle battery and motor-control technologies. They are growing in popularity, and legislators are in the process of determining how these devices should be classified, regulated and accommodated during a period of rapid innovation. Generally excluded from this legal category are electric bicycles (that are considered to be a type of bicycle); electric motorbikes and scooters (that are treated as a type of motorcycle or moped); and powered mobility aids with 3 or 4 wheels on which the rider sits (which fall within regulations covering powered mobility scooters). The first personal transporter was the Autoped, a stand-up scooter with a gasoline engine made from 1915 to 1922. Engine-powered scooters and skateboards reappeared in the 1970s and the 1980s. Twike and Sinclair C5 were 1980s enclosed hybrid velomobiles that also used pedal power. With the rapid improvements in lithium batteries in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a range of new types of personal transporters appeared, and began to spread into use in urban settings for both recreation and practical transportation. Dean Kamen applied for his first patent for a 'human transporter', the Segway PT, in 1994. This was followed by other patent applications prior to its product launch in late 2001 and first deliveries to customers early in 2002. Trevor Blackwell demonstrated a self-balancing unicycle based on the control-mechanism from a Segway PT in 2004 for which he published open source designs (see Eunicycle).