Arduway: a mini Segway using the Arduino

[Joe L] sent in the Arduway on the tipline. It is a robot made of Arduino and Lego NXT components based on the Segway. A software library to control LEGO NXT motors and a few sensors he used is available on SourceForge. This robot does a good job of balancing itself while moving forwards and backwards.

There is a YouTube video of it in operation after the break.

Comments [11]

tagged: arduino, Arduway, lego, Lego NXT, segway

11 Responses to Arduway: a mini Segway using the Arduino

Alex ~ says:

October 1, 2008 at 7:13 am

Thats pretty damn cool really.

Wonder if it could be upscaled to a full segway…

(Also looks like sometime didn’t resize their comp in after effects.)

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Unklegwar says:

October 1, 2008 at 7:27 am

Pretty awesome, but, I have to ask….

You can build a balancing robot, but can’t edit 40 seconds of blackscreen out of your video? what?

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evillawngnome says:

October 1, 2008 at 8:07 am

@unklegwar
god hackaday commentors suck.

Anyway, pretty cool project. It would be awesome to see this scaled up to a household robot – bar2-d2, or any other type of “helper” robot would benefit from such a mobility type.

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funylilman says:

October 1, 2008 at 8:58 am

I don’t know if I would trust a bar2d2 with all my booze if it balanced itself on two wheels.

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kevin says:

October 1, 2008 at 12:08 pm

that’s especially impressive considering that the reaction time required to keep the thing vertical would scale linearly with its size. it’s pretty jerky, but a larger mass would damp the movements.

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Ken says:

October 1, 2008 at 1:19 pm

The feedback looks pretty unstable, and I suspect all those camera angle changes are edits hiding the times the bot falls over.

Hopefully they have success improving the software. Unfortunately one of the things DIY electronics doesn’t teach you is sound system control theory.

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vilette says:

October 1, 2008 at 4:12 pm

standing is easy, more difficult is to control forward and bacward motion, and turn
btw, segway does not run alone

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kru3l says:

October 1, 2008 at 4:25 pm

this one is awsome too, using ir sensor instead of compass.
http://homepage.mac.com/sigfpe/Robotics/equibot.html

and what about this one, with a rod and a pot
http://www.ece.ualberta.ca/~dlaing/index.html

but this on is THE best, look him climbing the rocky mountains roads
http://www.geology.smu.edu/~dpa-www/robo/nbot/

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MSOE Student says:

October 2, 2008 at 6:15 pm

Next year’s freshman EE students at my school (MSOE) will be building their own one of these, built with the same lego pieces even i think. The EE department head showed me the one he designed last week. Looks similar to this one.

Except, it can be controlled by the accelerometer of a wii-mote :D

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Tim says:

January 29, 2009 at 3:26 pm

Looks like it could do with a dose of actual (i.e. PDI) control.

@kevin: Don’t know how you figure that. I would have though the reaction time required is inversely proportional to the moment of inertia about the wheels. That seems intuitive anyway; I haven’t actually done the maths.