A robot that balances on a ball

Erico Guizzo says: "Japanese roboticist Masaaki Kumagai has built wheeled robots, crawling robots, and legged robots. Now he's built a robot that balances and rides on a bowling ball. You say why? Kumagai says why not?"

A Robot That Balances on a Ball

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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technogeek

It’s just a two-axis indirect segway, right?
- Deidzoeb
  
  “just”!!!
DJBudSonic

It’s great to think someone built ONE of these, then suddenly there are THREE!
aaronlyon

Want! WANT WANT WANT!
Anonymous

But does it have the proper amount of suction?
Anonymous

Hey, it’s just like the biblical prophecy!
(seriously folks. I just can’t remember which book. But some people say the line refers to aliens)
lava

hey! its Serge!
- pyxl8r
  
  Am I the only other one to catch the Caprica reference?
  http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Serge
KeithIrwin

Honestly, I think that the video does a pretty good job of showing the answer to why. Those look like they’d be very useful in any situations where you need to move a lot of stuff around a large flat area (I’m assuming that they don’t really handle more rugged terrain currently). If I were setting up a fulfillment warehouse of some sort, I’d love to have some of those to help the workers out.
lasttide

It’s a classic controls problem (the inverted pendulum) taken to its logical extreme. Cool stuff.
Anonymous

wow, looks like someone one-upped CMU’s ballbot!
airshowfan

I’ve always thought it would be interesting to build a wheelchair where the person “stands” (by being on seat that’s like a bicycle seat, or a motorcycle saddle, or a parachute harness, or at least a knee chair) over something like this. This would reduce their footprint, similarly to Dean Kamen’s iBOT wheelchair and of course to the Segway, but even more so: it would fit entirely under the person, without anything sticking out (except possibly the person’s legs, depending on how solidly/comfortably they can be if their butt is not on top of a horizontal surface). A well-designed and expertly-controlled one would even allow for waltzing, etc.

I don’t know why no one is working on that. If I lost the use of my legs (or someone very close to me became a paraplegic), and I had enough money, I’d hire robotics people to do it. And there must be people in that position somewhere in the world.
Jordan

Sweet! Now all we need to do is mount on of those on top of one of these:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/04/ball_balance_machine.html

…and then repeat until we have a giant self-balancing tower!
freshyill

It’s been done: http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100126000821/megaman/images/e/e5/Mm2pierobotsprite.png
Anonymous

Well, now we can finally do that Gizmoduck movie in live action.
Cheaplazymom

Well, botboy does a better job of balancing on a ball than my daughter! http://vimeo.com/7150173 But, then, she can make felt animals and play the piano.
- Deidzoeb
  
  Cheaplazymom, your daughter is great and I’ma let you finish, but there was a boingboing post about a girl reciting Pi while balancing books on her head and spinning a Rubik’s Cube:
  http://boingboing.net/2010/03/26/reciting-pi-while-ba.html
  
  Does your daughter make felt animals *while* playing the piano? She only needs one more gimmick and then she’ll be boingable.
  - Cheaplazymom
    
    well, to be truly boingworthy she would need to be playing a song about traveling through a worm hole on an electric ukulele powered by her diy solar panel hat while balancing on a ball. I don’t see it happening anytime soon!
DarthVain

Fraud.

This is obviously a Ball that balances Robots.
Deidzoeb

The Dyson Ball vacuum people will need tissues when they watch this, either to clean up their tears or other messes related to over-excitement.
Anonymous

I’m more impressed by the standing cat video. How sad is that.
Pantograph

One more area in which machines are superior to me. *sigh*
flwombat

I’m not asking “why”, I’m asking “when I’m 100 years old can I pretty please have a power-chair that rides on a ball?”

It’s the intermediate step between the Hoveround scooter and the actually-hovering lounge chairs in WALL-E!
Brainspore

I don’t recommend that anyone watch that awful 2005 movie “Robots,” but the design for the character voiced by Mel Brooks was based on this concept. It’s also been used for several of the robots in the “Ratchet & Clank” series.