Development of a Transformable Self-Balancing Mobile Robot

Abstract

This paper reports the design, construction, and control of a mobile robot that can be transformed from the four-wheel mobile robot into two-wheel self-balancing robot and vice versa. The hardware of the robot utilizes the mechanism of the three-link manipulator. This robot is composed of three components; the body part, the middle link, and the top part. The system architecture comprises a pair of DC motor controllers to move the wheel, two servo motors to move the middle link and the top part, and an Arduino microcontroller board, etc. When the robot is transformed to the two-wheel self-balancing robot, the COM (Center of Mass) equation, and the IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) sensor are employed for attitude determination. The method of the control is based on a proportional-integral-differential (PM) control. The results show the possibility of performing both functions of the four-wheel mobile robot and two-wheel self-balancing robot.