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A Robot That Balances on a Ball
- frankus 17y agoOmnidirectional Segway, anyone?
- ars 17y agoA bit cheating to use such a heavy ball, but cool anyway.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- noisedom 17y agoJapan is about to have the most awesome grocery carts.
- ivankirigin 17y agoWhen I started at CMU's Robotics Institute about 6 years ago, the ballbot project just got started: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KPOOUsNRe4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KPOOUsNRe4
- grk 17y agoYou can make your own quite cheaply - with LEGO Mindstorms. I bought a set for my dad last christmas and he's been playing with inverse pendulum ever since. :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8jxGsg3p0Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8jxGsg3p0Y this is a lego robot balancing on a ball.
- idoh 17y agoHow long did it take your dad to build it? What type of expertise is needed?
- grk 17y agoThe vid I linked to is not my dad's. I think he got a segway-style 2 wheel robot to work. Took him about two months, but he doesn't have much spare time. The biggest problem was adjusting for inaccuracies in the measuring equipment.
- jdrock 17y agoI wonder if this would make bi-pedal movement obsolete, or at least less important to innovate. There would still be need to move up and down steps, but this form factor seems much more compact than current bi-pedal robots.
- eru 17y agoBi-pedal robots might not be that interesting in the first place. Insects might be a better role-model than humans.
- foomanchi 17y agoone major drawback to using a rubber coated ball like that is that it will pick up all of the gunk that it rolls over, and those omni wheels have a very low tolerance for obstruction before they get jammed.
- blhack 17y agoAbsolutely not. Can you imagine this thing trying to make it over a pile of sticks? Or a curb? Or really any obstruction of any kind? I don't think this is meant to be innovating in the "this is going to change the world" sense, but more "look at this cool robot I made!".
- abecedarius 17y agoMake a fancier version that can hop. (When this robot was sketched out in the "Inventions of Daedalus" column in Nature a few decades ago, he went into the how-to-hop issue too, though I don't remember any details.)
- teejae 17y agoReminds me of Ghost in the Shell:Standalone Complex robots.
- sketerpot 17y agoExcept that they had more than one ball to balance on; they just used the balls as omnidirectional wheels. (And they were awesome.)
- albertcardona 17y agoFor a moment I saw "Dalecs" without the armor.
- jellisjapan 17y agoCircus elephants and bears finally have some new competition.
- ttol 17y agoPrerequisite before usage: Extremely smooth hard surface with close to zero defects. Warning: Use on soft surface may result in the machine dislodging itself from the ball. Also, any obstructions, such as holes or other obstacles, may result in machine failure.
- evlapix 17y agoTypically the 3 omni-directional wheels makes direct contact with the ground. Even then, holes and obstacles are a concern. I didn't read the article, but judging by the video I see this more as a proof of concept. The balancing doesn't so much impress me. I liked what I saw of them being used together. If you scale the design up by any amount and increase the friction/traction between the omni-directional wheels and the ball (possibly by using a hard rubber surface that has some give to it) you would have a hard time finding a more capable form of omni-directional locomotion.
- anigbrowl 17y agoLaugh now, puny humans - but you won't be laughing when >crash<
- davi 17y agomore on omniwheels, which I did not previously know about: http://www.societyofrobots.com/robot_omni_wheel.shtml http://www.societyofrobots.com/robot_omni_wheel.shtml
- elblanco 17y agoI was quite enjoying the music on the video on that site.