The Balancing Robot
Now avaliable as a kit
A balancing robot kit is now avaliable via Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tkjelectronics/balanduino-balancing-robot-kit. Check out the blog post as well: http://blog.tkjelectronics.dk/2013/03/balanduino-balancing-robot-kit-kickstarter/.
Hello everybody
I have for a long time wanted to build a remote controllable balancing robot aka Segway – that’s was actually the main reason why I created the PS3 Bluetooth Library both for Arduino and the FEZ Devices. It has been a long time since the sneak peak and the performance has been improved a lot since then. The original one had a FEZ Rhino as the main processor, but I discovered that it was not fast enough to read the encoders, as it is not running embedded code. Also I was already using more than 10ms per loop, which I used as a fixed time loop, so I decided to step up a notch and go for a much more powerful device: the mbed microcontroller, which is an ARM Cortex-M3 running 96MHz.
It might have been possible with just a normal Arduino (NB: I have now ported the code to Arduino, see update for the code), but I didn’t want the speed of the processor to be an issue, so I decided to go for the mbed. The robot also features an Arduino Duemilanove with a USB Host Shield on top running a sketch based on my PS3 Bluetooth Library. The mbed board actually has USB Host functionality, but I decided not to port the PS3 Bluetooth Library as my original thought were to use an Arduino Due, but as you might know it hasn’t been released yet, despite the Arduino team announced, that it would be released by the end of 2011. But as soon as it is released I think I will port the code to it instead.
Video Demonstration
Here is a short video demonstration of the robot and me explaining some of the concepts of the design and how it works:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N28C_JqVhGU]
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