Planet Arduino

Omni wheels, sometimes referred to by the trademarked Mecanum name, are special wheels lined with rollers. Thanks to the orientation of the rollers, a vehicle equipped with four omni wheels (each driven independently) can move in any direction by vectoring each wheel relative to the others. A typical setup includes four omni wheels, but James Bruton proved that even a single one is useful when he built this strange self-balancing bicycle robot.

This robot is part of a larger project exploring full-sized self-balancing bicycles. It’s a small robot meant for experimenting with some unusual concepts. The front wheel is an omni wheel with its own motor and an axle that is perpendicular to that of the rear wheel, which is a conventional wheel driven by a second motor. The orientation of the omni wheel means that the robot can move the front end left and right easily, providing the inverted pendulum dynamic for self-balancing. When the robot needs to drive forward or backward, the rear motor provides propulsion and the omni wheel rollers spin freely.

As with other self-balancing robots, this requires fast and precise PID control to stay upright. An Arduino Mega 2560 board takes frequent readings from an IMU (inertial measurement unit) and detects if the robot tilts too far to one side. When it does, it turns the omni wheel motor in one direction or the other, measured by an encoder, to correct itself and balance. Commands sent from Bruton’s own custom remote tell the Arduino when it should rotate the rear drive motor. Steering commands influence the balancing routines, allowing the robot to lean or pivot in order to make a turn.

The post James Bruton’s strange bicycle robot self-balances with an omni wheel appeared first on Arduino Blog.

While the hoverboard craze has faded somewhat, the good news is that this means their powerful wheel motors can easily be found on online auction sites. Felix von Drigalski took advantage of this component’s availability, and created his own “HoverBot” which acts as something in between a radio-controlled skateboarder and a rather large self-balancing bot.

The device is built around an Arduino Mega, which takes input from an RC receiver, along with a Bosch BNO055 IMU, and passes appropriate signals to the motors through an ODrive controller. 

The HoverBot is a bit unsteady at high speeds, requiring close operator supervision. However, it looks like a lot of fun, especially when attempting tricks—sometimes successfully—at a skate park in the video below.

If you’re familiar with the Segway or other vehicles that balance in what is known as an “inverted pendulum” configuration, you may think that while interesting, creating something similar would be too complicated or out of your budget. Though perhaps still not simple, Joop Brokking takes you through his design for this type of bot in the video seen here, making it accessible if you’d like to build your own.

The robot, which will cost about $80 in parts, uses two stepper motors for greater movement precision than could be had with normal DC models, and employs an Arduino Pro Mini, along with an MPU-6050 accelerometer/gyroscope for control. It can be driven around by a Wii U-style nunchuck, which transmits to the robot via an Arduino Uno and wireless transceiver module.

You can find more info and product links for this project on Brokking.net.

Ready to level-up your robot skills? ArduRoller is a self-balancing, inverted pendulum robot that’s also capable of autonomous navigation indoors or out. I created it as an entry for the annual SparkFun Autonomous Vehicle Competition: The goal was to create a nontraditional vehicle capable of quickly navigating an obstacle course […]

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The post How to Build a Self-Balancing Autonomous Arduino Bot appeared first on Make:.

[Trandi] can check ‘build a self-balancing robot’ off of his to-do list. Over a couple of weekends, he built said robot, and, in his own words, managed not to over-design it. It even kept the attention of his 2-year-old son for several minutes, and that’s always a plus.

He was originally going to re-purpose one of his son’s RC cars, but didn’t want to risk breaking it. Instead, he designed a triangular 3-D printed chassis to hold a motor and some cogs to fit both the motor shaft and some re-used Meccano wheels. [Trandi]‘s design employs an MPU 6050 6-DOF IMU for the balancing act and is built on an Arduino Nano clone.

[Trandi] is controlling the motor with an L293D, which has built-in flyback diodes to minimize spikes. He found that the Nano clone was not powerful enough to handle everything, so he added an L7805CV voltage regulator. After the break, watch [Trandi]‘s cute bot tool around on various types of terrain, with and without a payload.

Don’t have an IMU lying around? You don’t really need one to build a self-balancing bot, as this IR-based lilliputian bot will demonstrate.

[via Dangerous Prototypes]

The miniscule size of this self-balancing robot makes it a cool project. It actually uses the motor and wheels from a small toy car. But when you look into how the balancing act is performed it gets way more interesting. The larger versions of this trick pretty much all use Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) which are usually made up of an accelerometer and a gyroscopic sensor. This has neither.

The black PCB seen to the right of the robot is an IR reflectance sensor. It shines an IR led at the floor and picks up what reflects back. [Sean] added this hack because the gyro sensor he ordered hasn’t arrived yet. The board has a trimpot which is used to adjust the sensitivity. You have to tweak it until it stands on its own. See for yourself after the break.

Self balancing robot builds are a great way to teach yourself about Proportional-Integral-Derivate (PID) algorithms used in a lot of these projects.