First steps

Inspiration

I wanted to build some kind of balancing robot for a while, and I thought that a ballbot would be a simple entry into this domain, unlike bipedal humanoid robots or similar stuff. Another big inspiration for me was Tazer, a youtuber who built a balancing bipedal robot to pass his masters. He gave some very insightful explanations on inverse kinematics and inverted pendulums(I have no idea how those work yet) on his secondary channel, and that gave me a push towards starting this kind of project myself.

What I actually did

Since I am awful at technical drawings and putting my own thoughts on paper, I started by first looking for some examples of ballbots, and I landed on this compact design from Navel robotics, that has a feature that lowers the center of gravity, increasing stability.

After I got the main design sorted out, I looked up for a few key parts. I got the IMU from Tazer’s robot, it’s a BNO055. The microcontroller is an ESP32, because I intend to use the Bluetooth function to connect a cheap controller, as opposed to a rc drone remote, because those are extremely expensive(I couldn’t find any cheap ones, if anyone is reading this and has any idea where I could find some cheap ones, comment pls).

Then, I spent some time searching for cheap omniwheels(might have to print my own to stay within the S-tier budget that I’m aiming for), and I settled on a 90mm juggling ball, which is also pretty expensive, so I will look for an alternative down the line.