Balancing Robot

By Abhi and Ben

Initial Work on Balancing Robot

Since our robot has two wheels and a long arm, we decided to take on an interesting problem: balancing our robot on two wheels as do modern hoverboards and Segways. Though the problem had already been solved by others, we tried our own approach.

We first tried a PID control loop approach as we had traditionally been accustomed to that model for our autonomous and such. However, this served as a large challenge as lag in loop times didn't give us the sensitivity that was necessary. However, we tried to optimize this model.

Next time we will continue fine tuning the gains, and use a graph plotting our current pitch versus the desired pitch to determine how we should tweak the gains to smoothly reach the setpoint. Another factor we need to account for is the varying loop times, and multiply these loop times into a pid calculations to ensure consistency. In addition, we may try to implement state space control to control this balancing instead of PID.