Segway Made from Lego Robot Kit Using Light Sensor For Balance

singularityhub.com

20 points·kkleiner··6 comments

I built a copy of the legway [0] 10+ years ago with the original Mindstorms kit. It was pretty darn cool and behaved a whole lot better (no drift) than this one. I even modified it to read a remote control so I could control its forward/backward/turning movements.

[0] http://www.teamhassenplug.org/robots/legway/

Looks like he needs to work on his drift a little, but otherwise this is really dinky. By which I mean neat. By which I mean I'm off to buy some Lego.

The drift, I think, is because he did not start the bot perfectly balanced. It has no gyroscope, so it's not correcting towards up, it's correcting to the initial light level when the program boots.

Not really a segway; not even close. Just a feedback control loop in a cute demonstration model.

That's right! You can't even ride it!! And just you try playing segway polo on it!!!! Useless!!!!!! ;)

Let me clarify: Segway innovated thru dynamic control systems that kept it stable through a wide range of speed, attitude and control inputs. To label something a "Segway" and then find out its just a simple feedback control loop is something like bait-and-switch. I felt the article title over-sold the actual article. Kind of like those highway signs that claim "biggest ball of string in Minnesota". I felt cheated when I saw it.

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