Society of Robots - Robot Forum

General Misc => Robot Videos => Topic started by: richiereynolds on January 24, 2011, 06:24:18 PM

Title: My first balancer
Post by: richiereynolds on January 24, 2011, 06:24:18 PM

Quite pleased with this, now just need to add some position awareness, collision detection and wireless steering.

[youtube]kjqOVqlQsAw[/youtube]

Title: Re: My first balancer
Post by: Ro-Bot-X on January 24, 2011, 08:46:32 PM

That is really nice! Where can we find more details?

Title: Re: My first balancer
Post by: smashing robots on January 25, 2011, 11:36:25 AM

If you want to make more public your robot please send me a PM. I have a blog regarding robots and I want to write about your project

Title: Re: My first balancer
Post by: richiereynolds on January 25, 2011, 02:44:08 PM

Quote from: Ro-Bot-X on January 24, 2011, 08:46:32 PM

That is really nice! Where can we find more details?

It's an arduino mega1280 powered by a 7.2V battery pack I made. There's also a 12V battery to power the motors.
The drive is an MD25 motor controller and EMG30 motors. I made a breakout board for the 7.2V power connection and  an I2C bus with some extra headers so I can add another processor later. The MD25 is I2C controlled.

I used PID for the motor control (still tuning ...) and an IMU 5DOF accelerometer and gyro for detecting the angle using 2 accelerometer axes, the gyro rate and a kalman filter.

Not sure the motors were a good choice, lot of backlash. Also, I originally had the heavy battery at the top which gives me more time to react to changes as it tilts slower but it also requires more torque to correct it and the motors just weren't up to it. It's quite a heavy RC car battery.

I got a lot of info on here: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1284738418/0 (http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1284738418/0)