Man Uses Wii Balance Board to Control A Robot, Plans to Move People Too

Juan González has hacked together a simple setup that lets his Wii Balance board move a small, irritating robot in any direction. This looks like the first robotic pairing for the board, which has to date has only been interfaced with computers as a control device to awkwardly navigate games and mapping applications. It’s pretty clear that González is excited about this hack (watch the end of the video), but he isn’t done yet- next up is is a Balance Board-based “robo-surfboard.”

How he plans on doing this is unclear, but the idea that the Wii Fit peripheral could help people be even lazier is fantastic. According to the man himself:

There are a lot of interesting things that can be done. But first it is important to perform some testing… The next stage will be the controlling of faster-and-wireless robots.

We have called this idea “Robosurfing”. Instead of using the Wii-board to “surf” in virtual environments or controlling virtual vehicles in the games, Why not use it to “surf” real mobile robots in a real scenario? It would be very, very funny.

It’s doubtful that anything like this could be very usable as a mode of tranport, but I have to agree with the “very, very funny” part. [Balance Board Blog]