It seems that bicycles are starting to make use of electrical suspension systems.
Today’s invention is an adjunct to that approach. It is a lightweight wheel which contacts the ground ahead of the bike and detects the detailed shape (and consistency) of the ground..
The scoutwheel’s motion would be monitored electronically (even optically) so that the suspension characteristics could be tuned in almost realtime to the geometry about to be encountered.
This tuning could occur by using straingauges to control the electronic suspension directly, ie in hardware, rather than having to deal with the millisecond delays caused by software-based processing.
