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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."
"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.
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.