SEGWAY!

[xnaut]

ok, our software subteam has decided to make our own segway... i know many other teams have acomplished or at least attempted this and we were wondering about any pre exsisting data sheets we could look on... inventor drawings, bluprints, hardware specs and sources, motor sizes... anything that would help our prosses along THANKS!

[EHaskins]

You may find these sites useful:
http://www.tlb.org/scooter.html
http://www.tlb.org/scooter2.html
http://web.mit.edu/first/segway/

[vamfun]

This is a great learning project. I've done a few of them with our 599 kids over the years.

Have you set any constraints on cost and hardware yet since this will help a lot in trimming down your design choices?

We tried a cheap version which used donated wheel chair motors, freescale demo board (with built in 3 axis accelerometer) and a silicon sensing rate sensor. The only major expense was a Sidewinder motor controller http://www.robotcombat.com/products/RP-SWDR.html.

We found it useful to build a Vex pendulum robot to develop and test the software before using it. This project in itself is very instructive especially if you want to get into the control theory behind the derivation of gains required to stabilize the robot. We did it both with a vex controller and a freescale demo board. Check http://www.youtube.com/vamfun channel for a few videos. There is also software and discussion thread on the vex forum http://www.vexforum.com/showthread.php?t=1593 . A white paper on the theory and matlab simulation is also on the vex site http://www.vexforum.com/showthread.p...ht=white+paper.

I have an extensive inverse pendulum and Segway data base so feel free to contact me if you would like some good papers or have any questions. Email me at vamfun@yahoo.com. This is also my AIM screen name and I chat a lot with the kids there.