hoverbot - hoverboard motor balancing robot

[@anthonyg4671]

From watching your videos I have concluded your brain is on another level 🤔

[@krosaen]

Super cool! Appreciate all of the details being included about the development process.

[@awesjosh]

Nice to hear from you Karl! This was one of those projects where making the video and explaining it was 4x the work of actually building the thing, so it is great to see it appreciated!

[@AerialWaviator]

An excellent design/build. Appreciate you taking time to explain your thought process and detail the build. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves as you learn and experiment. That hoverbot has a fun factor, I'd expect you probably already have ideas as to future mods.

[@rudisoft]

Good to hear you're still doing awesome stuff. Keep it going, make more updates!

[@awesjosh]

I'm working to keep them coming!

[@googleyoutubechannel8554]

Thanks for including the design, checking it out now, looks solid

[@ohaginias6609]

Excellent! Nice work Bro!!

[@awesjosh]

Thanks!

[@bylolo4964]

C'est juste splendide ❤

[@yunustalhaerzurumlu6547]

Hi man! I love what you build! I am waiting for more videos (maybe like the type of DevLogs, similar to the robot dog video.)

[@sermadreda399]

Great video thank you for sharing

[@andreasr3412]

Very stable control! You are using your pi3hat, which does not have a magnetometer, right? Is it sufficient for the yaw calculation to use the gyro value of the Z axis or have you also installed a magnetometer and fused the sensors?

[@awesjosh]

Correct, there is no magnetometer. The yaw for the robot just uses gyros, which means it does drift a bit with time, but that is totally fine for a teleoperated platform.

[@mihir777]

No ROS2? Was this pure C++? Amazing project!

[@awesjosh]

Correct, this has no ROS2. You can see the code at: github.com/mjbots/hoverbot

[@jonwatte4293]

Looks like fun! What's the power distribution (?) board beside the pi?

[@awesjosh]

Thanks! You called it, it really just does pre-charging and over-current faulting: mjbots.com/products/mjbots-power-dist-r4-5b

[@jonwatte4293]

@@awesjosh I end up building something like that into almost every board I make, so it makes a lot of sense to have that as a stand-alone unit 🙂 Those who haven't struggled with power management might wonder why they'd need to spend money on a glorified power switch; I think it's up to us who have stubbed our toes to explain why ...

[@amorpheuses1627]

Thanks for another interesting project! Question: can the pi3hat be used with a raspberry pi 5? Wouldn't think there would be a problem - but would like to check.

[@awesjosh]

Unfortunately no, it can't be used with a raspberry pi 5. It only works with a pi3 or pi4.

[@amorpheuses1627]

Opps checked the manual and it clearly states it isn't.

[@yoggi56]

Hi! Thank you for sharing this video! Do you use any observers or filters to obtain wheel velocities?

[@awesjosh]

moteus uses a pll filter on the hall effect sensors for commutation purposes, and that is the reported velocity that was used for the outer velocity control loop. The bandwidth of that filter was somewhere between 50-100Hz, so it doesn't do much at low speed with the coarse resolution of the hall encoders.

[@yoggi56]

Thank you! I do similar project and for now use the similar control approach but with some differences kzbin.info/www/bejne/gn7ZdqZ8br5ld7ssi=PAa4gED8A2Uu-Ezu In the future I'm going to ustilize mpc for increasing the stability and the robot's speed

[@awesjosh]

Cool! Thanks for sharing! As you can see from my video, you don't need to go to MPC to get significantly improved results. Probably the easiest ways to improve your system would be to see if the structure of your control laws can be improved (or perhaps copy the ones here), and the second would be to ensure your attitude and attitude rate solution are operating well and with a sufficiently high bandwidth. It could also be that your tuning is just sub-optimal. Are you using integrative terms anywhere (you probably shouldn't)?

[@yoggi56]

Thank you for recommendations! Yes, I use integrative terms both in attitude loop and in velocity control loop. I have some suspicious about imu. It outputs data only with 100hz. Probably if I replace IMU to better one, the whole system will be more stable.

[@awesjosh]

I'm not sure an integrative term for attitude is useful, certainly this robot does not use one. A feedforward term is probably a lot more valuable there if a plain PD is insufficient. While a 100Hz IMU update rate is borderline feasible, there are lots of things that could potentially make it problematic. That could be if you are just using pitch and not pitch rate, or if the IMU has a software configured low-pass filter, or if it is poorly mounted, or a host of other things. This robot uses a 400Hz update IMU for instance with a 200Hz onboard filter, uses the pitch rate in addition to the pitch, and is known to work well at up to that rate.

[@igort5418]

Those motors are an overkill

[@awesjosh]

Yep, they just happened to be ones I had lying around. However, you can't likely get similarly sized ones any cheaper.

[@vishaltejwani940]

can I use it in electric skateboard?

[@awesjosh]

While you could for a low power skateboard, something like a VESC would be a more appropriate option.

[@Jp-ue8xz]

put a claymore on it o_o

[@oracid]

💙🤍❤ 🗼