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The segway is basically an inverted pendulum, a system that almost any undergraduate who takes dynamics will solve the equations of motion for. Dean's invention is unique in the fact that he plops a human on top of it, the human leans forward and backward to control it, and the machine is balanced using five gyroscopes (three for three axes of rotation, two for intermediate axis error checking), and the output of these gyros is fed into multiple chips running feedback control loops to keep the thing standing up. Plenty of people have come up with the idea of putting a human on top of one of these before, including my dynamics professor last semester. He showed me a project proposal he did in the 1970s, it's the same idea. But this was for only one axis. He even showed the project proposal to Dean a couple weeks ago when he gave a lecture at Cornell! Dean quickly was able to explain why the segway is so much more complex.
My point is a lot of professors have come up with idea or similar ideas... Very few own patents on anything, and those who do, the idea is for only one axis (forward & backwards), while the segway can turn on any radius and on sloped surfaces. The gyro technology and integrated feedback control boards (15 years ago, the technology on the segway did not exist, and what did was too slow or too big to fit on a segway), or even the way the machine is controlled by the human or turned on, makes the system unique enough to deserve a patent.
I don't suspect Dean will have any trouble with patents. His trouble lies with lawmakers, and making it legal to ride segways. From what he said here a couple weeks ago, it's now legal in about half of the US states to ride on the sidewalk.
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