ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Members of the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Facebook Group have been invited to enter their location so that we may build a map of the People and Places of MINDSTORMS. A month later we can start to get a good idea of who's who and where on earth is the MINDSTORMS community! Have fun exploring and connecting with  MINDSTORMS experts from around the world, don't hesitate to join us on  Facebook or share your passion via comments on this blog or use the following hashtag on  Instagram when sharing your amazing robots: You and your EV3 robot:  #EV3selfie #ROBOTMAK3R Your amazing robot: #MINDSTORMS #EV3 #LEGO At a cool event?  #MINDSTORMSMAGIC    : . .

We are all familiar with what Google has done with the invention of it's Street View Car.. and we see the result each time we click on Street View* on Google Map!  Well Mark Crosbie has recently completed his latest version of the LEGO STREET VIEW CAR and it works pretty much the same way as the real thing...  Here is a video showing the history behind this project: Worth mentioning is that Mark and his LSVC will be present at the World Robotics Olympiad finals held in Abu Dhabi this year -- If you are a WRO finalist and will be present in AD this coming week, be sure to go visit The Robotics Experts booth in the main hall and check this cool Mindstorms creation in action. More detail on Mark LSVC can be found here: http://www.mastincrosbie.com/Marks_LEGO_projects/LEGO_Projects.html More details on the WRO can be found here: http://wroboto.org/en/ * Maybe one day we will be able to see LEGOLAND under Google Map's Street View mode!! :D

In the RIS days, it was hard to make a robot that could map out its surroundings using only LEGO's official parts, since there was no distance sensor like the US sensor. Now with the NXT, it can be a lot easier. This week's inspiration is to create a robot that can at least partially map out obstacles in its surroundings. For example, can your robot display a "map" of a room, showing where the obstacles are in it? If you wanted to take it even further, you could try to make the robot "store" the map in memory and then navigate around obstacles using the map (this might be pretty advanced, since you would need a system to tell the robot its position, so that it would know if it was getting near the position of an object on the map). One very nice example of a radar robot was posted on the blog earlier, here . This robot spun around 360 degrees and mapped objects within a certain range, like radar. This method seems relatively easy, but has the drawback of onl...