anish k mampetta graduate student, robotics institute carnegie mellon university, pittsburgh, pa

home ballbot past projects robotics course work resume contact if you can dream it, you can di it

Ballbot is an extremely cool robot under incubation at the microdynamic systems laboratory. This guy is as tall as an average human being and moves around on a single spherical ball. Conceived by prof. ralph hollis, the efforts of tom lauwers and george kantor breath life to it. Right now the ballbot balances and moves around....watch the video! video 1: point to point motion video 2: response to disturbance Microdynamic Systems Laboratory(MSL) One is enough (a paper on ballbot) ________________________________________________________________________ simulation of ball-bot in Maya A typical scene showing an abstraction of ball-bot, floor, wall and other indoor obstacles like furniture The inbuilt ik-solver in Maya can be used to get the configuration of the robot during dynamic simulation. The figure below shows various configuration obtained by adding a skeleton to the model and using Maya’s ik-solver. Maya uses non-linear optimization to solve the inverse kinematics. The figure below shows a dynamics simulation of ball-bot in Maya. It is not very clear (to me at least!) how Maya accomplishes this nor has the integrity of the simulation been tested from an engineering perspective. However it looks pretty realistic. [the figure illustrates the sequence with ball-bot set free from an initial vertical position at t=0, t=2, t=3, t = 4 sec] Maya is a powerful graphics tool. Though originally intended for Animation and visualization, there are many exiting features that come handy for physics based simulation. By using a clever mix of Maya’s inbuilt capability and problem specific solutions, possibly one can make a very good simulator.