Hardware and control design of a ball balancing robot

This paper presents the construction of a new ball balancing robot (ballbot), together with the design of a controller to balance it vertically around a given position in the plane. Requirements on physical size and agility lead to the choice of ball, motors, gears, omnidirectional wheels, and body frame. The electronic hardware architecture is presented in detail, together with timing results showing that real-time control can be achieved. Finally, we design a linear quadratic regulator for balancing, starting from a 2D model of the robot. Experimental balancing results are satisfactory, maintaining the robot in a disc 0.3 m in diameter.