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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."
Repeat from last year October
"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.
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.
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.
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.