ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Update to our post to Mark Crosbie's LEGO® Street View Car: Mark posted a comment hinting to his web page that provides detailed information on the car. Have a look! There are many interesting details to be found, including a lot of pictures, program source code and another video :

Last week, The LEGO® Group and The X Prize Foundation announced the second Moonbots contest: Moonbots 2.0, A Google Lunar X PRIZE LEGO® MINDSTORMS® Challenge . Free registration and Phase One of the contest will be open from May 9th through June 13.

During LEGOWORLD 2011 CPH, there was a nice new movie presented on a BIG screen above the MINDSTORMS area. The movie had 2 totally new models that can be build with a single NXT 2.0 retail kit ( #8547 ). The movie is present on the LEGO MINDSTORMS website, but I think most of you did not find it yet.. therefore here it is, enjoy. here is the [ link ]

Where do you get when you merge a bunch of hackers with LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT robots at the South by Southwest Music and Film Festival in Austin, Texas? Have a look :

So here's is something that I consider one the most fascinating NXT creations of the last years: C5, the Flying NXT Blimp . Two danish students, Lasse and Kenneth, created it for the LEGOWORLD Copenhagen 2011 where they managed to actually get it flying, controlling it remotely. They even attached a camera to it, shooting movies and photos from above: Supercool! You can get more details on their web site, BrickIt.dk . Besides, the movie is also hosted on the official LEGO MINDSTORMS site .

NeXTSTORM , Greek creator of many a fascinating LEGO® model, has published a new movie , this time on Kevin Clague 's stunning pneumatic robots that could be seen on LEGOWORLD 2010 :  

Well, this video by people from the German roberta program is almost a year old already, but I detected it just now - and it perfectly fits the season:

Your wife or mother has always asked you to do something "useful" with all that expensive LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT stuff you spent your money for? Dave Astolfo now has the ultimate answer: Pulito , a room-cleaning sweeper robot. It uses the new DFlex sensor from Dexter Industries and (amongst other things) is able to recharge itself (!). For more videos, images and details, see the related web site .

Have just returned from LEGOWORLD 2010 in Zwolle. With a lot of fantastic people from the MINDSTORMS community around, it was a great experience : Note that for some reason, I did not even catch all of the intriguing and brilliant creations on film that could be seen at the MINDSTORMS booth.

For my actual project, a soccer-playing NXT robot, I've started with a prototype that is capable of finding a ball that broadcasts infrared signals; on that behalf it uses the IR Seeker Sensor by HiTechnic : The programmed with leJOS NXJ , the Java platform for LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT; working with it again revealed to me how powerful and elegant, yet easy to use leJOS has become by now.

One of the highlights of my vacation in the last two weeks was a visit to the mother of all LEGOLANDs in Billund, Denmark. Though there was not a single NXT there (not even in what is said to be Europe's largest LEGO® shop), it supplied other kinds of fun:

Fana'Briques 2010 's topic was "Space", so I brought along two LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT astronauts, the NXTronauts :

From the official MINDSTORMS site, there's a new NXT 2.0 bonus model available: NXTitzki , a basketball-playing NXT robot that is named after Dirk Nowitzki, a famous German NBA player. NXTitzki can either be remotely controlled by a player or run autonomously, using the Ultrasonic sensor for obstacle detection and the feet-mounted color sensor for line detection (which allows for interesting navigation strategies and pitch setups). When using more than one instance, nice matches and tournaments can be devised, so it might prove an attractive model for classroom activities also. It was designed, built and filmed by me; feel free to visit the associated page at my NXT web site.

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:

Suited to the occasion, here's some little just recently YouTubized retro movie of an Easter NXT Robot dating back to the Stone Ages of NXT MINDSTORMS  (*sigh* those were simple days ... ): Happy Easter to everyone!

When roaming about some prehistoric parts of my NXT-related web site lately it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to assemble some YouTube videos from media snippets of yet unYouTubized robots  created back then. So here's one of the creeping Slug , one of my first NXT robots at all, dating back to my MINDSTORMS Developer Program days in 2006:

Here's the fourth animal-like robot I have built from Fay Rhodes' book "LEGO© MINDSTORMS NXT Robots Alive! Endangered Species" : the Polar Bear . You might have already seen Damien Kee's nice video on it; like him, I love particularly Fay's idea of making the front legs looking like they're walking. Building time: around 90 minutes. Programming time: 10 minutes. Difficulty level for children: advanced.

So here's my next build of an animal-like robot from Fay Rhodes' "LEGO© MINDSTORMS NXT: Robots Alive! Endangered Species" book: the Gorilla . Again, Fay did an extraordinary job of implementing the animal's appearance and way of moving. My favorite robot from the book so far! Building time: around one hour. Programming time: 10 minutes. Difficulty level for children: advanced.

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.

Finally, I have found time again to resume my review of Fay's new book "LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT Robots Alive! Endangered Species" . After the NXT Frog , I've built the Komodo Dragon : Being somewhat fragile and delicate in regard to the type of underground it is running on, the model is a very nice and elegant implementation of a reptile and mimics wonderfully the particularly reptant pace of this kind of animals. Building time: app. 30 min. Programming time: 3 min (the program is very simple) Difficulty level for kids: medium