ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Isogawa Yoshihito ,  sparkling source of ingenious LEGO® ideas, has published * a device with another way to move a mobile robot, the mozo mozo machine : In the video it is not propelled by a NXT, but there's no reason why one shouldn't us one here ... Besides: "mozo mozo" is Japanese and may roughly be translated as "to move in order to snuggle up to someone". * actually  some months ago, but I detected it just right now

On a web page of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory , I ran about an interesting mobile robot design that might be worthwhile to implement with a NXT robot also: the " Axel rover system ": The big green LEGO® Technic wheels come easily to mind...

Daniele Benedettelli , creator of the NXT MINDSTORMS Johnny 5 robot and author of the book "Creating Cool MINDSTORMS NXT Robots", has published a video of a new creation of his, a LASER-guided mobile NXT robot:

MCP Dave Astolfo has published a new NXT robot of his: the DualGrip . As the author states: "The idea was to have a treaded robot that could navigate varying terrain, turn quickly and of course, climb.  Based on my experience with my other robots using the same tracks (eg UNV and DynaTrax ), I found that they were not very good when it came to inclines.  I figured that the LEGO rubber wheels have great traction on most surfaces, so why not slap a set of them along with the treads." The point with the DualGrip is that it switches from tread drive to wheel drive when it encounters an incline - pretty good idea, isn't it? Have a look at the three web pages associated to the robot - there's a lot of information on the DualGrip to be found, including two more movies.

Remember the NXT Switchboard , the NXT-based remote control I posted some weeks ago about? It allows you to remotely control each motor of a NXT robot independently. However, it turned out that it's better suited for immobile robots as it's usually pretty difficult to actually steer a mobile robot when you need to control each of the driving motors on your own. So I decided to create another remote control particularly aimed at such car-like mobile robots, called NXT Wheel ; as a consequence, it has a large hand wheel and a speed throttle: The response time is somewhat low, though...

Mark C from Ireland has published a neat video on a cube-shaped mobile NXT robot, called Que-boid: Very nice! Do not forget to visit Mark's web site which is a true blossom in the NXT web garden; a multitude of very interesting NXT (and other LEGO®) projects can be found there, alongside with detailed building instructions.