The self balancing robot using Arduino is not an uncommon project and I thought that it was about time to whet my curiosity with a slightly more hard coded project. With my experience thus far in Purdue University’s Systems and Controls classes, only LabVIEW had been used to program a line follower robot, understanding the basics of PID controls, system identification, state-space control and, ultimately, culminate into a restricted elective class in Automatic Controls where we tackled the challenge of balancing an inverted pendulum system. However, with LabVIEW acting as somewhat of a crutch, programming was limited mainly to block programming, which immensely simplified the process of achieving the basic outline of the program. As such, one of my goals was to create my own self balancing robot as my introduction to my pursuit of robotics that I have been desiring to pursue for so long.

This project is only the beginning of what I hope to be a life long learning process of robotics and thus I took it upon myself to not only read tutorials and understand how the basics of Arduino worked, but also create a chassis of the robot from scratch. So as can be seen in the following images below, the CAD was made in FUSION 360 which included iterations of both the main body of the robot, as well as the lid on top. The basic circuit with the Arduino was a combination of circuits from various websites all soldered together and placed into the robot. The basic components include the MU6050, Arduino Nano, L298N Motor Driver Module and Gear DC Motor with the wheel as with most reference projects form the links below.

As of now, it is still a work-in-progress as it has been a project that I have been juggling in between my classes, research and preparation for my senior design. However, I hope that I will be able to get it more optimized before I graduate. If you have any questions about the chassis design or want the CAD for the design, please contact me here.

Website Links:

https://maker.pro/arduino/projects/build-arduino-self-balancing-robot

https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects/arduino-based-self-balancing-robot

https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Self-Balancing-Robot-1/

http://www.brokking.net/yabr_main.html