Balancing Robot

Botka, The Barely Standing Robot. This is one impressive balancing robot. Not even a bit of jitter. Midway through the video the thing takes on some solid whacks and still standing. For comparison: NXTway-G (the Lego Mindstorms NXT uses the Atmel AT91SAM7S ARM processor).

Botka probably uses some sophisticated PID control? fuzzy logic enhanced or a Kalman Filter? given it’s amazing response even in motion.

I remember doing Kalman Filters way back in my graduate courses, pretty hairy level of mathematics, but real cool nevertheless once you got a simulation working. Never thought I’d see the daylight of that again. It seems to be integral to many embedded industrial control systems.

Anything which requires very accurate real-time prediction and correction like image stabilization, noise reduction, maglevs, satellite navigation, cruise control,…