Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #05340
To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: "John A. deVries II" zozzles@lanl.gov
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 10:54:40 -0600
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: Hoverbot & balancing acts ( was: LEGO lawnmower)
At 12:34 AM 07/21/1999 , Van Zoelen, Bram AA SSI-TSEA-352 wrote:
>> Does this robot really require wheels?
>>
> You can also let it hover and the propellor can cut the grass in one go.
> Bram
Well, you could if you had enough energy (i.e. external power source,
gas-powered, or -very- light batteries, etc.) I don't think that it could
be made to work given typical BEAM technology (i.e. solar powered, biggish
capacitors, or batteries that weigh a lot.)
An interesting question comes up: given a sufficient energy source, let's
say that one was designing a ground-effect style machine (i.e. a hovercraft
& not a helicopter). How does one usually control which direction the
craft is going? Would one gimbal the 'engine' or would one have
controllable louvers or what?
A similar question: an old problem in control theory is the "balancing
rod". In its most simple form, you've got a cart that can only move (back
or forth) along a line. Attached by a hinge is a rod that you want to keep
pointing upwards. If no control is applied, the rod will fall. The
problem is to move the cart forwards or backwards to keep the rod upright.
Given a potentiometer (variable resistance) connected to the hinge, how
would it be possible to construct a nervous net controller for such a cart?
Is it really just another version of a "head"? Would you need something
like a Unicore controller? Is some yet-unknown nervous net controller
feasible? Would there be some angle/velocity sensing system that would be
more appropriate for nervous net use?
Just more food for thought...
Zoz
p.s. more complicated problems include a rod-on-top-of-a-rod and a rod that
is gimbaled by a ball-and-socket joint so that it could fall in a
two-dimensional manner.
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