DominoBot NXT (ver1)
May 2006: Update: DominoBotNXT has been enhanced. See DominoBot2. For those who do not know about the Lego Mindstorms Developer Program (MDP), back in January of 2006 Lego was seeking assistance from the Lego community on their next generation Mindstorms product (NXT). Approx 9600 people applied to become one of the 100 MDP's. In late February, I received an invitation to participate and of course jump at the opportunity. For a few months, the group…
Climber
Climber - One day while browsing the LEGO Mindstorms site, I noticed some pictures about a show in Germany. LEGO had built 2 cool wall climbing robots to help market the product. I was amazed at the design and capabilities that they had and wanted to find out just how hard it would be to build something like this and have it actually work. It was quite a challenge. Building the components was the easy…
DominoBot 2
DominoBot 2 was my take on re-creating my original DominoBot. After I had finished the original, I found ways to make it more efficient and better at what the original did. I also did not have the limitations of the parts supplied with the RIS and UBS sets. One of the parts that needed re-designing was the mechanism used to force domino's out of the chamber. The original tended to have difficulties at times. I…
RopeClimber
Rope Climber has been built for the rtlToronto Lego Robotics Event - Rope Climbing. In a nutshell - build a robot that can find and climb a rope. Sounds easy right? Not! In the tradition of rtlToronto, there are some interesting rules to make this more challenging. First off - the robot must fit within a 8x8x8 square on start. The trick - the rope is hanging 12 inches off the ground. The robot must…
PicoCam
PicoCam was built as a proof of concept. Its purpose was simple, navigate an area using typical avoidance routines while capturing live wireless video/audio and transmitting it to a receiver. The was never really completed because I had other ideas The pictures shown here are of the final version, with working navigation, but I did not bother going the last step to get the live video to display (even though it will work). (more…)
TrackerBot
You would think I have a template for "room-navigating" TrackerBot evolved from the recent PicoCam robot I created. After I had finished PicoCam, I decided I wanted to try something with tracks. TrackerBot and PicoCam share similar intelligence, with TrackerBot having some slight improvements. The general idea is that it will navigate a room using a variety of sensory input for obstacle avoidance. There are 3 Cybermaster touch sensors, 1 DIRP light sensor and 1…
BigWheel
Big Wheel (BW) was an experiment at building a robot that uses the HailFire Driod (StarWars) large wheels. It's job is simple; build an autonomous robot that can navigate any area while avoiding obstacles by not hitting them in the first place. To do this, BW uses a DIRPD sensor to "see" left, right and center. This allows BW avoide obstacles from 3 views before actually hitting them. (more…)
FireBot
One of my early projects was to build a fire extinguishing robot. I did this using the parts I had at the time. It was based on a walker platform and used a pneumatic circut to "blow" the fire out when detected. It worked reasonably well with the provided light sensor. Recently, I discovered the PIR (Passive Infrared Sensor) from TechnoStuff. This sensor was built to detect infrared heat and seemed to be a good…
Fire Extinguisher
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Johnny 5
Johnny5 was built more as a test to see how similar I could build him out of lego. Programming on Johnny5 was simply line following with object avoidance via touch sensors at the front. His hands and head would also move in a pre-defined pattern. The pneumatics are there for visual effects. They serve no function on this model. Rate This Post: