And if it’s so simple, why wasn’t this invented a long time ago?
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The gyroscopes in these contraptions aren’t what keep them straight. What they do is produce a small force when they’re tilted which is detected by a sensor. A computer inside the device then uses that information to tell the motors to correct for the tilt. The processing power needed to make that work had already been around for a few years but it still needed someone to come up with the idea and give it robust enough programming to make it work.
The technology was invented 30 years ago (at least). The first use that I am aware of was in Dean Kamen’s iBOT, a self balancing wheelchair. Take note that this precedes Apple’s use of the “i” in naming products by a good five years.
> And if it’s so simple, why wasn’t this invented a long time ago?
Gyroscopes have been around since the mid 1800s. Traditional gyroscopes are mechanical devices that use spinning wheels mounted in a gimbal. Spinning wheels tend to resist changes in their orientation, so the gyro would remain fixed while the frame rotates around it, allowing the rotation of the frame to be measured.
Nowadays, the term “gyroscope” is often used as a general term for devices that measure rotation, and there are lots of different types. The “gyroscopes” you would likely find in your phone or a segway are MEMS (microelectromechanical systems). These measure rotation using a tiny vibrating arm which is deflected by the Coriolis effect. These tiny mechanisms are fabricated using the same processes used to fabricate integrated circuits – allowing the mechanical components and the driving electronics to be fabricated as a single silicon chip. This technology is obviously fairly recent, but allows for a sensor that is both very cheap and very small. However, it is less accurate than other options (even less so than a traditional mechanical gyro) – in fact, you generally need an accelerometer as well to correct for the drift in the gyro (the accelerometer measures gravity and can tell the system which way is down – sometimes a magnetic compass is included as well).
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