PENS-wheel (self balancing one-wheel vehicle) mechanical design and sensor system

Many electrical vehicles have been developed recently, and one of them is the vehicle type with the self-balancing capability. Portability also one of issue related to the development of electric vehicles. This paper presents one wheeled self-balancing electric vehicle namely PENS-Wheel. Since it only consists of one motor as its actuator, it becomes more portable than any other self-balancing vehicle types. This paper discusses on the implementation of Kalman filter for filtering the tilt sensor used by the self-balancing controller, mechanical design, and fabrication of the vehicle. The vehicle is designed based on the principle of the inverted pendulum by utilizing motor's torque on the wheel to maintain its upright position. The sensor system uses IMU which combine accelerometer and gyroscope data to get the accurate pitch angle of the vehicle. The paper presents the effects of Kalman filter parameters including noise variance of the accelerometer, noise variance of the gyroscope, and the measurement noise to the response of the sensor output. Finally, we present the result of the proposed filter and compare it with proprietary filter algorithm from InvenSense, Inc. running on Digital Motion Processor (DMP) inside the MPU6050 chip. The result of the filter algorithm implemented in the vehicle shows that it is capable in delivering comparable performance with the proprietary one.