Tag: Balance

Disney’s research branch just revealed a crazy robot that can hop on a single leg. It doesn’t need a tether either, and has an on-board power source and controller. Now they just need to scale it up and give us a cool pogo-stick robot for personal transport.

Footwear hasn’t exactly been a hotbed for true technological innovation, but these shoes change that. Israeli startup B-Shoe Technologies has developed some new shoes that incorporate some really helpful features. Like, helping you to not fall.

Well, there goes my plan of hiding on a rock cliff from robots who can’t get me because they don’t know how to walk a tightrope. It appears they can now walk tightropes with the greatest of ease.

If you ever went riding on a seesaw when you were a kid, you know how unrewarding the experience could be if the kid on the other side weighed decidedly more or less than you. But thanks to the laws of physics, one designer has come up with a solution to this problem.

Self-balancing unicycles aren’t a brand new concept, but other than the Ryno motorcycle, I really haven’t seen much footage of them in action. Apparently, I even missed their appearance on Mythbusters back in 2009, which I thought I watched religiously.

This incredible, unusual robot can balance itself on any of its corners when stood on point. The Balancing Cube was developed by Sebastian Trimpe and Raffaello D’Andrea for the Institute of Dynamic Systems and Control. The strange looking robot uses a set of DC motors and sensors attached to six networked balancing mechanisms which allow the robot to constantly maintain an upright position.

Now I’m pretty sure that the whole Segway fad is over, but it looks like others have different ideas in mind. While this unusual horse-like vehicle looks interesting on paper, I’ve got trouble looking at it and thinking about transportation.

This jolly little robot gets around not by walking or crawling, but by rolling along on a single unicycle wheel. Murata’s Seiko-chan (Murata Girl) self-balancing unicycle robot first came onto the scene back in 2008, but has recently been upgraded so it can tool along 3 times faster than the original.

Sometimes the most obvious ideas make great titles. Such is the case with Cat Cat Watermelon, a browser game about simple cats, and also watermelons. Oh, and stacking, but Cat Cat Watermelon has a slight edge over Stack Cat Watermelon.

This guy made a sweet little DIY balancing robot that balances without the help of fancy gyroscopes. It’s kind of like a poor man’s version of the Segway-esque A.M.P.bot, the main difference being that this one falls down a lot.

Think the Segway is just too geeky for your Born to Be Wild bad boy lifestyle? Then check out this cool new motorcycle born at the intersection of Geek Street and Hog Heaven Avenue. The Uno is a self-balancing motorcycle that uses a pair of gyroscopes to constantly keep its rider upright.

These crazy-looking contraptions strap on to your legs and feet, letting you fly high into the air and perform crazy stunts. The spring-loaded PoweriZers amplify the pressure of your jumps enabling you to perform death-defying feats of athleticism.

This nifty bit of robot footage comes to us from Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Back at the end of 2005, the Institute developed two animatronic dinosaurs (one Tyrannosaurus Rex, one Parasaurolophus) that could actually balance and walk without any external stability systems.

A recently filed patent application from Sony shows that they are working on a technology that is similar to that in the ubiquitous (and superfluous) Segway Human Transporter. The patent abstract, titled “Vehicle steerable by movement of center of gravity” describes the invention as follows: …a vehicle which can travel in the front and back direction and which can turn by right and left wheels rotated when a rider riding on a step-board moves the position of rider’s balance from the center of a vehicle base.

PLEN, the Desktop Hobby Robot is a little (9-inch tall) robot from Japan which is capable of balancing itself on a mini-skateboard or to skate on its own included rollerskates. Here’s a video of the robot in action: PLEN’s 18 joints can be controlled remotely using a Bluetooth phone and can run for about 25 minutes on a single charge.