Ball-balancing robot is a master show-bot

We’ve seen soccer players balance themselves over a ball for our appreciation and their personal fun. Now, it’s time to extend that praise worthy applause we’d reserved for our favorite soccer star to the BallP, or Ball Inverted Pendulu – a ball-balancing robot developed by Dr. Masaaki Kumagai, director at the Tohoku Gakuin University's Robot Development Engineering Laboratory. This 20-inch, 16.5-pound robot isn’t a soccer star by a chance, rather is a motors, micro-step controllers, gyroscopes equipped robot who with built-in accelerometers can balance upright on a ball and move around with heavy load on its head. While we spend some time trying to figure out the actual applications of this bot, and also confirm why it has a ball to balance on instead of wheel or legs to move about? You take a stroll down to check the video to see the robot in action.

ball balancing robot

Via: IEEE Spectrum/Dvice