We are Jeroen Waning, Brian Kosoris, Bahati Gitego, and Yuriy Psarev, and this is our senior design project here at Southern Polytechnic State University… (A) Ball-Bot is a robot (fully autonomous) that balances on a ball. In our case, it was a vertical aluminum structure approximately 3′ tall and balanced on a basketball. Our system used four motors independently controlling four omni-directional wheels that rolled the ball in the direction of the tilt angle. The tilt angle refers to the angle of the superstructure (aluminum frame) that sits atop the basketball. We used an Arduino MEGA 2560 and an on-board MicroITX computer for the brains of the whole system. An IDG500 gyroscope and ADXL345 accelerometer were used to take inertial measurements and determine the three-dimensional orientation of the robot in real time. An inverted spherical pendulum best describes the kinematics of the system.
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