Author Andrei
02/07/2019
One very often made project for electronics that you might make is a balancing robot. Tech_support make his own balancing robot and posted the entire tutorial on instructables. The project is very cool and amazing to see how the robot will automatically adapt the speed and direction of rotation of the wheels in order to stay always streight. These kind of robots are using some sort of sensing to detect accelerations or gyros. With that the microcontroller could then calculate angles. If the angle is not horizontal the robot will automatically change the rotation of the wheels to counteract the movement in the oposite way.

Usually, the motors could be step motors becasue those are easy to control but also to know exaclty the speed and the position of the rotating shaft.

The problem of a self-balancing robot is that of an inverted pendulum. In order to counter-act the force of the robot falling either forwards or backwards we need a mechanism which will keep its center of gravity directly above the point in which it pivots. This pivot point would be our wheel axle. The strategy of counter-action will be conducted by driving the robot's wheels in the direction in which it is falling. To move the motors he used a H-bridge because he is using DC motors. But he also needs a feedback from the motors but it seams he doesn't have that.

To adjust the angle rapidlly he is using a PID control inside the code of the Arduino. PID is very powerfull and will keep this kind of system steady. All you have to do later is to adjust the PID constants so the reaction to movement is fast, exact and precise.

If you want to see the full tutorial, you have the original post here. He explains everything you need to know about PID, motor control, coding the Arduino, how to build the frame and connect everything so check his tutorial. I hope you will also like this project.

Apart this post, if you have your own project and you need good quality PCBs, consider using the services of JLCPCB.com which will offer you quite good services, I use their services a lot of my PCBs.

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