Awesome Balancing

After building several self-balancing machines, engineer James Bruton wanted to see if he could make one that could help him walk across a narrow beam. It uses a large motorized wheel that changes direction based on the angle detected by a sensor. The trick is not letting his body compensate too much for its motion.

Spinning a cheeseburger on an umbrella sounds like a ridiculous and unnecessary endeavor. But after watching juggler Michael Rayner balance one on edge, spin it around, and separate its pickles, we’re all for the concept. The only thing better than this video is watching it at 5x speed.

We imagine it’s hard enough to walk on level ground while balancing another person on your head. Giang Quoc Nghiep and Giang Quoc Co pulled off the trick while climbing up 100 stairs. They did it in record time, ascending to the top of the staircase in just 53 seconds.

There are robots out there that can walk on two legs and drones that can fly. But Leonardo can do both, using its rotors to help it balance while walking. It can even skateboard and slackline. Veritasium takes a look at this unusual hybrid robot being developed by engineers at the Aerospace Robotics and Control Lab at Caltech.

It’s pretty tricky to balance a cube on one of its corners or edges. But ReM-RC shows off a really cool machine they built that does just that automatically. The system uses an ESP32 controller, an MPU-6050 gyroscope-accelerometer chip, and a set of three servo motors that spin wheels to maintain its balance.