Ball Balancing Touchscreen
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 8 of September , 2008 at 1:39 am
This isn’t exactly a robot, but it is a neat little adaptive feedback system developed by the Real Time Systems Laboratory at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy that takes all of those silly little tilty-ball games that you can get for your iPhone and brings them into the physical world:
A touchscreen senses the position of the ball and sends signals to x and y axis servos to keep the ball in the center of the screen. I have no idea what (software-wise) is doing the number crunching, but it’s quick enough to adapt to some fairly aggressive motions. Whether or not it (in of itself) is useful is debatable, but it sure is neat.
[ RETIS Lab ] VIA [ AI Robotics ]
Comments (7)
Category: DIY
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Comment by Micaman
Made Tuesday, 9 of September , 2008 at 9:07 am
Amazing! Really fast reactions and perfect control.
Comment by skythra
Made Thursday, 11 of September , 2008 at 9:05 pm
zomg, this should be implemented in vehicles, like busses and cars to run their suspension systems. Adaptive suspension like that would determine a perfectly flat ride at all times!
which, on a buss would be a big benefit…
Comment by Surfraz
Made Wednesday, 17 of September , 2008 at 7:14 am
As SKYTHRA said this should be implemented in all vehicles for smooth ride really a wonderfull thing. When the ball is not on the touch screen it remain calm thats great.
and iam intersted in things like this where can i find stuffs to learn about them, how to creat them etc or can u suggest me some books
Comment by ethan454
Made Thursday, 18 of September , 2008 at 8:31 pm
Mercadies alredy is developing a suspention that does what SYTHRA is talking about.
It uses a set of lazers in front of the car to detect things like pot holles/speed bumps and calculates that with the speed of the car then tells the suspention to push in or pull out a tire.
I wonder of you could put a robot on the touchpad and instead of having the table tilt, the commands are given to the bot to healp it ballance. Have the robot remember what the touchpad did to corect it thereby teaching the robot how to ballence.
–ya it would require some rewriting but that has a chance of working right?
Comment by TouchScreen
Made Friday, 19 of September , 2008 at 6:00 am
Very amazing!
The engineer who participated at this project responded here:
http://dev.emcelettronica.com/ball-control-touch-screen-using-microchip-microcontroller
(he is PJ)
Comment by Crispy
Made Thursday, 25 of September , 2008 at 12:41 pm
I wonder what would happen if they put multiple balls on there at once
Comment by Nightfall
Made Monday, 25 of May , 2009 at 4:35 am
pretty amazing how they do that!