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Discuss “Robotics on a roll: Researchers unveil Ballbot”

Legs may now be obsolete — at least for robots. After a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers recently unveiled a new robot that requires neither the use of legs nor wheels.

Instead, the mobile robot, dubbed Ballbot by the team, moves by balancing on an aluminum and polyurethane sphere.

Ballbot is the creation of the Robotics Institute research professor Ralph Hollis, who built his first robot in 1957.

“When I was in high school I read an article on them in Scientific American,” said Hollis. “I thought they were the coolest things.”

But there is very little resemblance between Hollis’s new robot and the robots he originally read about.

Inverted mouse-ball drive

Ballbot uses an “inverted mouse-ball drive mechanism,” as coined...

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