Hoverboards: Your So-Called Sci-Fi Life

October 1, 2009 12:00 AM

Daniel H. Wilson’s first book, How to Survive a Robot Uprising, poked holes in our Hollywood-supplied anxiety over automaton-on-man violence, while quietly educating us on real-life robotics. Now the renowned author—and PM’s resident roboticist—is taking on the jetpack-commuting, Smell-O-Vision-scented future that never happened. His new book, Where’s My Jetpack? ($14.95, Bloomsbury, due out this week), is funny—but it also turns out to be a tribute to the far-fetched ideas that often drive progress. In the first of four excerpts for PopularMechanics.com, Wilson tackles the hoverboard:

Wide-eyed children of the '80s watched in astonishment as Michael J. Fox (a.k.a. Marty McFly) shredded pavement on a hovering skateboard in Back to the Future Part II. The hoverboard was just like a skateboard, but with one crucial difference: no wheels. His pink and teal board had “magnetic” pads on the bottom and with a quick push-off could silently cruise over grass, pavement and even water. While this highly desirable piece of movie technology seems very plausible, it crushingly remains fiction. I think I speak for all of us when I say, “Thank you for breaking my heart, Michael J. Fox.”

But dry your eyes, sport—hoverboards do exist, sort of. There are serious, but partially surmountable, technical challenges to making a piece of wood fly, especially over multiple surfaces, noiselessly, and without running out of energy within five minutes. These challenges have not stopped inventors from scheming, and there are several existing prototypes to choose from—none of which solve all of the problems at once.

Building your own hoverboard prototype is apparently easy. According to plans purchased from a back-page advertisement in a comic book, humankind’s most state-of-the-art hoverboard can be built with parts harvested from a gas-powered leaf blower. Every hovercraft works on the same simple principle: Fans push air downward and the ground pushes the board up. Roughly, you’ll need a motor from a leaf blower, a skateboard-sized hunk of plywood and plenty of plastic and duct tape. These components form the three main pieces of a hoverboard: the engine, the board and the rubber “skirt.” Make a hole in the plywood board big enough for the leaf-blower nozzle. Now staple a sheet of plastic to the bottom of the board; this thin plastic skirt seals the area between the ground and the board, trapping the air and creating more lift. Finally, attach the leaf blower near the end of the board and fire it up. The whole contraption takes only a few hours to build and moves like a puck floating over an air hockey table.

Similar but more complicated hoverboards can be purchased from Future Horizons Inc. This company produces a variety of hand-made or do-it-yourself hoverboard kits. These high-powered hoverboards are made of fiberglass shells and weigh about eighty pounds. Rear-mounted “thrusters” can push the board forward without your feet pushing off the ground. Another commercially available hovercraft, the Arbortech Industries Airboard, doesn’t resemble a hoverboard at all, but may still be a lot of fun if you don’t mind the expensive price tag. The disc-shaped Airboard is a gas-guzzling beast that stretches approximately 6 ft. long and weighs over 200 lbs. This self-powered hovercraft can move up to 15 mph over land or water.

As it stands, hovercraft technology would probably not be useful for escaping from angry hooligans in a quasi-futuristic park setting. Current prototypes are too heavy, noisy and slow. They may be perfect for cruising over flat surfaces like water, ice or a well-manicured lawn, but they are dangerously inept on city streets. The wheels of a regular skateboard provide a conduit for control between the leaning, swiveling, foot-pumping rider and the city streets. Without wheels to provide friction between ground and board, however, a hovercraft can’t steer precisely, slow down or stop quickly, or regulate speed when it goes downhill. In a freestyle competition, the ordinary wooden skateboard wins for now.

Luckily, there exists another breed of “experimental” approach that capitalizes on $10 words such as “antigravity,” “ionic field” and “supermega atomic power pack.” HoverTech offers the best of the worst from the fringe science community. The company promises a hoverboard that floats silently at up to a foot above the ground—without the use of fans, jets or any moving parts. The key idea is to ionize a column of air (i.e., make the air electrically charged) and then surround it with a cylindrical magnetic field which prevents air from escaping from under the board—sort of like a superhovercraft with an impenetrable rubber skirt. In theory, trapping ionized air beneath a board is possible, but the key problem is power: There isn’t any existing way to provide enough of it on a mobile platform. However, with enough juice a rider could stylishly scoot around on a foot-high column of trapped air.

Some crazy-ass mad science will have to go down before you can cruise around on Marty McFly’s pink party board. In the meantime, hovercraft-based hoverboards are a reasonable real-world solution to humankind’s critical hoverboard shortage. Personal hovercraft could become a common sight as engines shrink in size and grow in efficiency, and as fans become quieter and more powerful. So read a comic, send off your nickel in exchange for secret hoverboard instructions from the government, and hope that your dad doesn’t notice that his leaf blower is missing.

Plus: Author Q&A

Previous Resident Roboticist columns: Robots Are Tougher Than You (Part 4): Inner Space, Robots Are Tougher Than You (Part 3): Outer Space, Robots Are Tougher Than You (Part 2): Nuclear Radiation, Robots Are Tougher Than You (Part 1): The Deep Sea, Top 5 Robots that Own You, Top 5 Robots You Can Own, Pushing Human Boundaries, Living in a Robot Ecosystem


Wheres My Jetpack?

A toy version of the hoverboard made popular by Marty McFly in Back to the Future, Part II

The motor from a leaf blower makes up the main component of a DIY hoverboard.

Your DIY hoverboard takes a few hours to build and moves like a puck floating over an air hockey table. (Photograph by Craig M. Groshek/Wikipedia)

The Future Horizons hoverboard kit purports to use a 6-hp gas engine to power a propeller and lift riders 3 in. off the ground. (Photograph by Future Horizons Inc.)

The disc-shaped Airboard is a gas-guzzling beast that stretches approximately six feet long and weighs over 200 lbs. (Photograph by Arbortech Industries)

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