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."

Comments

not news...

[IdahoEv]

"Many have tried, and failed, at getting a robot to sustain it's own balance

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 ... "why didn't I think of that?".