November 8th, 2008 Balancing robot
This is a very interesting DIY project, a little Segway, off course it won’t carry you but it will self balance. The brain of the robot is the Arduino board, the entire robot is powered from a battery, although the author tried to keep the cost to minimum the final “price” was above 300$.
The sensor for the balancing algorithm was a 2 way accelerometer and one encoder in each motor, all the electronics was bought as a kit, since the author as he stated, a programmer. This can be encouraging for those who want to replicate the robot, since you don’t need to be a hardware guru to build it.
The control algorithm needs a lot of adjusting, trial and error tests and patience.
The balancing robot has one major inconvenient, how to get it up? It is a lot of fun doing it and certainly it is a noticible achievement, but in lack of control it will just stay in one place. I recommend this project to students who want to experiment with different control algorithms like PID, Fuzzy.
Balancing robot: [Link]
November 11th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
There’s another toy Segway called Arduway made with the Arduino and Legos for which the software is published on Sourceforge.
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1221664564/
November 11th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Dave, it seems that more and more interesting things are getting developed on Arduino