Development of Laboratory Scale Self-Balancing Prototype Robot

There are many projects on building self-balancing robots - ranging from simple DIY analog balancing bots to sophisticated self-balancing scooters. Self-balancing electro-mechanical systems have various uses, including the ability to showcase the computational performance of new and emerging embedded processors. The project would primarily focus on the software implementation of the algorithm by incorporating a physical model of the robot and the available sensors onboard the PIC controller. The software itself is intended to be portable and can be used on any self-balancing platform based on the controller by tuning a few parameters. This book chapter presents the development of a laboratory scale self-balancing prototype robot. It addresses the balancing mechanism issue based on the theories of inverted pendulum and rotational inertia. It comprises of two major sub-systems, i.e., mechanical and control sub-systems. The implementation of the mechanical and control sub- systems is described in detail.