[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.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw9Jr-SPL0Y&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]
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.)
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?
@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.
I don’t know if I would trust a bar2d2 with all my booze if it balanced itself on two wheels.
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.
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.
standing is easy, more difficult is to control forward and bacward motion, and turn
btw, segway does not run alone
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/
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
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.
dam this is going on my twitter great info.