Every so often, I find myself smiling when I see positional and motor control loops being diagrammed out for clarity sake. The Telepresence Interface by Pendulum Inversion, or TIPI for short. TIPI is a project from four students at the Mechatronics Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo.
You can see the project website at http://patfairbank.com/tipi learn about the efforts they took to create this system.
While the system is dynamically balancing itself and handling disturbances, I have to agree with a robotic engineer I was speaking to at Inno-Robo that dynamic balancing is more of a distraction for remote presence application. But, with the QB implementation of dynamic balancing, I still can see how first-movers/innovators will be just fine with the balancing system.
(h/t to Dallas Goecker from Willow Garage)