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Robotic Balancing Cube Sculpture

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 19 of May , 2010 at 3:20 am

Obey gravity. It’s the law. Unless you’re this cube, in which case you’re perfectly happy balancing on a single point, which is a vaguely startling feat for something so large and made of metal. This balancing cube was created by Raffaello D’Andrea, Sebastian Trimpe, and Matt Donovan from ETH Zurich… You might remember D’Andrea; he helped create the robotic zombie chair.

The concept for the cube is relatively simple: like most balancing robots, it has some form of gyro (in this case, an inertial measurement unit) that can tell how much falling-overness is taking place and in which direction. This information is relayed to servos inside the cube to swing weights around, changing the center of gravity of the entire robot and keeping it steady and upright even to the extent that it can resist a gentle push.

The whole “that really should not be allowed to ignore gravity” concept really reminds me of this insane thing… Except with the balancing cube, the worst that happens is that it topples over, as opposed to, I dunno, killing us all or something.

VIA [ IEEE ]

Comments (4)

Category: Art

4 Comments

Comment by Zool

Made Wednesday, 19 of May , 2010 at 8:49 am

It looks like a prototype of the robot Rubik’s Snake weapon from the film Demon Seed!

Comment by [[dbalieiro]]

Made Thursday, 20 of May , 2010 at 3:27 am

#coolStuff

Comment by team building training

Made Tuesday, 22 of November , 2011 at 11:39 am

An interesting dialogue is worth a comment. I believe that you should write more on this topic, it might not be a taboo subject however usually people are not sufficient to speak on such topics. To the next. Cheers

Comment by new jersey telecom

Made Tuesday, 22 of November , 2011 at 10:21 pm

That was clever. I’ll be stopping back.

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