Building a Self-Balancing, Radio-Controlled Telepresence Robot

This chapter is the final project of the book. We will build a self-balancing robot that you can combine with your smartphone or tablet to create a telepresence robot. There is no need for a telepresence robot to be self-balancing, but it is a really fun way to explore some interesting new concepts. This robot is based on the line-following robot that we built in the previous chapter, but we will make necessary hardware upgrades and add a few more exciting featwures to create an even more capable robot. We will also learn how to use sensor fusion for pitch estimation with an IMU sensor, how to estimate wheel velocity from position encoders, and discover some more interesting applications of CAD and 3D printing.

This example project is the most advanced in this book and gives you the opportunity to see a lot of interesting concepts come together. The chapter is packed with hands-on experiments, and is structured as follows...