Project KITTY

Background

For my Modeling and Control of Motion Systems course, we had a group final project assignment where the objective was to build a device that demonstrated feedback control. My teammates and I were all fascinated by the ability of cats to always land feet first while freefalling, and we wanted to build a device that mimicked this behavior to some extent.

The idea we finally came up with was a device that holds an inverted pendulum upright through the use of a reaction wheel. Reaction wheels are often used in satellites and other spacecraft to hold or change their orientation, specifically by accelerating the reaction wheel in a precisely controlled manner.

A flywheel attached to a motor acts as the reaction wheel and is controlled by an ESC and Arduino microcontroller. An IMU was used to measure the angular position of the rotating body. Below is a diagram of the device construction:

Results

Our group implemented a PID-based method to control the movement of the reaction wheel. A video demonstrating the functionality of the project is below: