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DIY Segway-Style Balancing Robot
clarionhaze writes "Many have tried, and failed, at getting a robot to sustain it's own balance. However; Steve Hassenplug accomplished it with with a small robot he made out of legos and a program in C that runs on BrickOS, an OS made for Legos! You can check out his site or read the article over at TechTV." Update: 01/18 15:52 GMT by T : Unanimous Cow writes "David Anderson of the
Dallas Personal Robotics Group has an
excellent web page with images and movies of his two-wheel balancing robot. This one uses a single-axis inertial measurement sensor and is very robust on uneven surfaces and off-road."
Now I *know* i've seen the story posted at /. before...can't find it tho in search.
Repeat from last year October
Same as .... this!
timmah cant read, or at least he doesnt appear to read slashdot. He is the true repost master here. If you dont bother to read slashdot, then why the hell would you take a job as one of the moderators? I am sure there are tons of people willing to take the job who would actually take some pride in their work.
Whould'nt it be easier to give the bot 4 wheels?
FRA: STFU GTFO
October last year .......
To think that this site sold for millions. Jesus.
Dean has a neat trick - every year he unveils a contest that asks the kids to do something new, engineering-wise. In two of these, it seems it was something he'd already figured out - the iBot wheelchair and the Segway - this just blew our minds in FIRST when we realized he and his companies had already come up with one method for something, and we were working on the same idea, guerilla, six-weeks to ship, Apollo 13 style.
/.'d - can't wait to see an RCX on two wheels...
Damn neat. Leaves you speechless.
Site seems
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Interesting story.. Here's something related: Humanoid robot ASIMO designed by Honda. Check out these impressive movies (realplayer format supported) of ASIMO in action. It would be nice to have one around to clean up the flat for example ;)
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"Many have tried, and failed, at getting a robot to sustain it's own balance
... "why didn't I think of that?".
Many have tried and succeeded, as well. Balancing a two-wheeled robot (or balancing a pole from the bottom, or a four wheeled robot on top of a randomly rolling cylinder, etc.) is a fairly common design project for undergraduate engineering students in control theory. I'm not surprised someone did it in legos; they're a perfectly good platform for such an experiment.
Kamen was not the first to come up with a balancing machine -- he's just the first I know of to market a useful (?) consumer product using such a system for human control of a vehicle. One of those head-smackers
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
/. came out and who was left?
but then there are others.
There's some Quacktime and Real movies.
my sig
Didn't we read about this like last year in October?
Only for embryos age 1 to 4 months.
--If you don't like the following post, please skip it asap--
We all know such a category would be the busiest, with hot dupes coming off the Repeat Mill at a steady rate.
It would be great because articles like this must be important enough to be on the front page annually, sometimes 2 or three dupes on the same page, sometimes one after another on the same page... Since the editors believe these articles are so important yet so elusive when they check for previous stories by searching slashdot (they DO check, right?), lets move the dupes to their own categories as they are discovered.
I am serious. Dupes are great, because I missed this LegWay article the first time around. But let's label the dupes, okay? Except, only allow dupes MISSED by editors when they post, to keep the category fun and to hold the editors responsible for when their name will appear in 10 articles in a row in such a category...
(But I do believe slashdot is just posting dupes under the alias timothy all the time because they want to appear higher on google through links to interesting stories that people would search for. It's not a news site, but a interesting stuff site.)
Cover your eyes and click this link!
No BrickOS is not an OS for legos. Because legos is a competing OS made for LEGO and LEGO bricks.
I played with LEGO as a kid and now as an adult. I really wish someone would have nurtured that facination and help me learn a few things. You know, back in the old days, before you could look everything up on the internet. You actually had to have something documenting some basic technologies then.
now a days, a kid could search google for a few things, and then find the answers or a great little document written by some MIT type. Where's that little thing that turns you into a kid when you need it.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
One of those head-smackers ... "why didn't I think of that?".
Someone may well have thought of it before... someone may even have tried to whip one up in his basement, but Kamen took the idea and turned it into a commercial product.
That takes a special kind of human being. A friend of mine is a little like that: he keeps a small recorder on him (and under his bed) and dictates ideas he gets to himself. He may wake up one night thinking "What if I printed ads for companies on those flexible magnetic sheets, slap them on cabs and pay the cabbie a sum for the privilege?" (In Holland cabs generally have no ads on them). Next morning he starts making phone calls, to buddies in advertising firms, to cab companies, to printers, ect. etc. He spends an enormous amount of energy, and 49 out of 50 times it comes to nothing. It's that successful nr. 50 that counts though.
You have to admire people like that, having the drive to follow through on an idea and getting a company off the ground. Me, I am much to lazy for that... I'd wake up with an idea, think "Hmm neat" and go back to sleep.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I've read slashdot everyday for a few years, but for some reason never saw the original article. And given my interest in robotics, I'm very glad this was posted, repeat or not.
I don't understand the mentality of someone who feels the necessity to point out every mistake that slashdot moderators make. I mean, you could be a troll, or you could just be anal. In either case, you contributed nothing to anyone. You apparently think someone has hired you to act as a critic. Critics annoy me to, unless they happened to be named Homer Simpson... then I just laugh.
You can just build one of these out of scaled up, 1 foot legos. Save thousands!
Using the DMCA, Dean Kamen and Segway have sued a group of nerds who, in their garage, built an open source Segway for $50 that uses Linux and a Beowulf cluster comprised of 4 386's and a rotary bladed push mower from a garage sale.
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
A friend of mine built a self-balancing unicycle at the Stanford robotics lab in the 1980s. That's a much tougher problem. There's no metastable point that can be maintained with small corrections.
If you want to do this, the correct sensor suite is a rate gyro and a pair of accelerometers. Back in the 1980s, both were expensive; now they're cheap ICs. They're auto parts. To get a good value for "down", you integrate the rate gyro and run it through a high pass filter, then add the accelerometer value,filtered through a low pass filter.
There already is a LEGO robotics program for children ages 9-14
Intelligent Autonomous Systems, neat robot projects including a neural-network pole-balancer, with pictures and whitepapers
Link
Pole-Balancing Mini-Robot using neural networks
Link
Intelligent fuzzy logic and PCB fab with pictures and video
Link
Reinforcement Learning Pole-Balancing Applet by Appl
Link
Demonstrations of Several Solutions to the Pole-Balancing Problem by Jeff Lawson and Chris Lewis
Link
Comment removed based on user account deletion
sorry about the dupe guys... i'll search more thuroughly before i submit an article... still pretty interesting.
all i see are 1's and 0's
I remember October, do you?
*sigh*
Is halloween just this fuzzy "where was I?" feeling? I distinctly remember carving tux (onto a pumpkin).
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
It really is simple to build a robot that will retain it's balance, even without any electronics. You simply need big wheels and a heavy weight under the axle, so that the point of gravity is underneath the point of rotation (the axle). My guess is he did that, if only to assist in keeping the balance. The wheels seem pretty big, and it looks like to motors are right in between them. The last thing you want to do is make the robot top-heavy.
I spent a lot of my childhood playing with Legos, and the time I wasn't spending playing with Legos, I was playing with computers.
Anyway, to the point, during middle school, one of my projects was to build simple robots and control systems, using Legos and an Apple][e. It's been quite a few years, so I barely remember the details, but one of them drove around, another one acted as a motion sensor; the most complex one undertook a series of actions when the motion sensor was triggered, so it was nothing extraordinary; but Legos are (or at least were) used in some schools. This was a few years before Technics were even available, I think; so they may have even been the prototype.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
The balancing act is a very old automatic control problem. Solutions are given in almost every text on the subject. You can get more information on it by searching for "inverted pendulum" on google.
See, why overpay for a Segway, when I can build a better machine out of 10 GHZ Athalon's, a 500 GB HD, 15 GB of RAM and run Open Office, GIMP and Gnome!
Oh, wait, I got Segway confused with Apple....
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
Does it? They must've thought of this... I hope.
What's "earlier position'?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I think it was a joke... you know, an attempt at humor? Oh, I guess you don't know. Bummer. Life sucks when you can't laugh.
To original poster... you forgot "j/k"
phbbbbt and stuff
I really must say, I'm amazed by some of the comments. This robot wasn't built to prove anything to anyone. It was built because the builder wanted to challenge himself. If you don't like it, close your browser. Steve Hassenplug
Any site that lets retards like you feel superior must be worth millions.