I recently built a self balancing robot and it balances quite well as long as the surface is a high friction surface like a carpet or bed. But put the robot on a smooth floor and it will balance momentarily then drift away. Tried lots of sollutions like cascading PID routines, increasing main loop HZ, programming fixes but nothing worked. Then found this blog: https://polyengineer.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/self-balancing-robot-pid-control/

I have been laid up this winter and have been working from home the past several months.  Idle hands ARE the devil's work so I decided to take on a machine learning challenge at CodeProject.com and build a recommendation engine like Amazon, Facebook etc.  These are interesting pieces of software that in commercial sites can work in conjunction with search engines to lead customers to content, products or items they might never would have looked at otherwise.  In fact, this is something that might be useful on LMR - maybe have a recommendations window for when a user logs in?&

Hey everyone, it’s me again.

So today I’ve been working on a project: recreating Steve Grand’s artificial neural networks from the old “Creatures” games on Arduino. Why, you ask?

A while back Jason made a phone controlled rover using the MotorAir. He wanted to revisit the basic idea but using cheaper, more widely available parts. Also since this is Arduino based, it is a great springboard for more than just a rover that drives around. You could add sensors, servos, etc. to really drive this project in any direction you want.

https://youtu.be/Qx0tvpr2DNw