Ballbot: Carnegie Mellon University

Ballbot: Carnegie Mellon University

Following quote from above wikipedia article under heading "robotics":

• Ballbot: Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new type of mobile robot that balances on a ball instead of legs or wheels. "Ballbot" is a self-contained, battery-operated, omnidirectional robot that balances dynamically on a single urethane-coated metal sphere. It weighs 95 pounds and is the approximate height and width of a person. Because of its long, thin shape and ability to maneuver in tight spaces, it has the potential to function better than current robots can in environments with people.^[28]
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• ^{It is interesting to me the concept of having a robot on a ball that is basically the size of human beings. Even though the balancing on a ball might take up a lot of the processing of the CPU, if there was more than one cpu this wouldn't matter. Since such a robotic vehicle could navigate on any one floor of a building and even theoretically get on an elevator and travel to other floors in a building, such a robotic vehicle could work in a variety of ways within any building with an elevator and function on multiple floors quite easily. It think it's a great idea!}