ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

On Friday April 26 2013, project LEGO MINDSTOR MS WAL L-E5 made it to Mars!!! That's right, NASA had a cool booth at FIRST World Championship 2013 in St-Louis with a full size replica of the Curiosity rover!  To get him to the NASA booth I got some help from the kids of Packer Collegiate Institute.   We turned little Matt's bad luck of being stuck in a wheel chair into a fun way of transporting Wall-E Later on that day, back at the LEGO MINDSTORMS booth we got the super visit of Kjeld (yes, the owner of LEGO) We where honored he joined us for this group picture. One of them even managed to get his LEGO book signed!!!  And that gave me the idea to ask if he could...   YES! so now, not only does WALL-E5 has a cool NASA sticker... he also has an autograph by Kjeld! I had an awesome time. Thank you Packer kids, thank you LEGO! Rock on LEGO MINDSTORMS!!! : . .

The fantastic LEGO® MINDSTORMS Curiosity Mars Rover , built by Will Gorman and Doug Moran, keeps getting prominent: after having visited the NASA , the WRO in Malaysia and the European Robotics Week in Prague, it will now be shown in a very popular TV show called " Quarks & Co "! These days, the dutch "NXT family" Vuurzoon , well-known for great creations like Mindy MINDSTORMS , LEGO® friends NXT or the  LEGO® Gramophone , went to the broadcast station in Cologne for shootings where Anika Vuurzoon served as a presenter. The scenery looks great: MINDSTORMS Rover in the Quarks & Co studio driving in the “Mars” dessert Anika controls the MINDSTORMS Rover during close up “drill” recordings The show will be broadcasted on 11th December at 9 PM; I'll definitely be watching it!

So last night I stayed up till 2:30AM to watch the NASA Live feed as Curiosity was doing it's remarkable landing on MARS... At the same time I was imagining how cool an NXTfied model of Curiosity would be!!  Well today I discovered that while I was just starting to think about it... a team of LEGO Robotics Expert where actually ready to show off their latest version! That's right, Doug Moran and Will Gorman were at the "Build the Future in Space" event at NASA's Kennedy Space Center with an awesome fully functional LEGO MINDSTORMS Curiosity model Check out the video of it in action: Little did I know, they did a presentation of this robot when Curiosity launched back in November 2011,  in other words, they have been working at this for as long as it took Curiosity to get to Mars!! go to Will's website to see more video and early prototypes of the LEGO MINDSTORMS Curiosity http://battlebricks.com/curiosity/ I really like how it turned out! Nice job guy...

Yesterday, the NASA has launched the new Mars rover Curiosity . The car-size robot spacecraft is the most sophisticated Mars space probe ever and expected to land on the Red Planet in August next year. For the launch event, MCP Will Gorman created a NXT model of Curiosity that was on display yesterday in Kennedy Space Center :