ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Guest blogger Hans Odenthal share's with us an amazing project built by his son. This was built by my son  Bram, 17yo from  Trevianum in Sittard School in the Netherlands.    It was for a study project that every student has to do at the end of the secondary school. That can be any topic and since he wants to start a career as software engineer, he choose a technical subject. Within borders, you can define your own project that of course need to be approved by the school.  He was inspired during a tech event and he saw the real robots. Since my company was a sponsor of these robots, it was easy to make an appointment to meet the real robots and to learn how the real one works. For the study project, my son wanted to know if it would be possible to build a single robot with the same functionality as the real one, meaning: The robot should drive in any direction using omni wheels The robot can see the ball The robot can drive towards t...

July 15, 2013 - Changchun Landing to Changchun , China. Woohoo! However my luggage -including what's important …my EV3 robots- are still missing somewhere in Beijing (don't ask, my fault apparently).  A warm welcome from Eric Steenstra and LEGO Education’s territory manager at the airport and everything feels much better! July 16, 2013 We have to prepare the setup in Changchun. My robots are still in Beijing and news are not so optimistic.  We decide to proceed to plan-B: Build and program a new set of robots within the next 12 hours. I, Eric and the guys from LEGO Education we start working hard ...well we're not really stressed because we can do it! Late at night my robots arrive in Changchun!!! Everything looks cool now!  July 17, 2013 The campus of the Changchun university is huge and superb, full of kids of all ages and thousands of Chinese teachers. The national robotic competition ( FLL ) is held at the Sport and Culture center of t...

Ready for a completely new LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Soccer experience? Mario Ferrari and Daniele Benedettelli joined their efforts to create a completely automatic Soccer Game System. Forget RoboCup Junior robots that wander randomly on the field, without any clue of their position! The game field itself is a hybrid wood/aluminum/LEGO robot, that counts the scores and throws the ball back into the arena. Check out more at robotics.benedettelli.com and stay tuned for updates!

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.

Last weekend, the SteinCHenwelt 2009 LEGO® event took place in the Swiss Technorama Science Center at Wintherthur, Switzerland. Here's the movie I made about it; though I could be present on Saturday only, it was worth the journey to Switzerland. Also the NXT 2.0 soccer robots performed quite well at their first mission.

Registrations are now open for RoboCup Junior Australia events. To register, please visit: http://www.robocupjunior.org.au/ and follow the links. The offficial national rules are also on that site, but I have worked with local organsiers to produce a set of summarised 'guides' that include some clarifications and modifications to suit the RoboCup Junior Tasmania competition. The RCJT Guides are available as PDFs from the Robotics Tasmania web site: RCJT Guide to Dance 2008 (100 KB, last updated 16/6/08) RCJT Guide to Rescue & Premier Rescue 2008 (170 KB, last updated 16/6/08) RCJT Guide to Soccer (135KB, last updated 29/6/08)