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MindStorms Madness
plluke writes "I'm a Teaching Assistant for a course named CS148: Building Intelligent Robots offered by the CS Department at Brown University. Our robots were made/programmed/run on Lego MindStorms (with LegOS). Tres funky results include probabilistic sonar mappers, a bipedal walker, and a bartender. The final exhibition page is here and contains the aforementioned funky results."
From the course intro page:
The only requirement for the project is that it be "extremely cool"
This is the sort of academic requirement I can live with!
The 14th Sign of Alcholism:
When you spend an entire semester designing legos to pour drinks for you. It's time to get help. Run, don't walk, to your nearest AA meeting.
I know it's probably hard to kill a .edu, but those detail pictures are about 1.5MB each. /.ing here we come
Semper Ubi Sub Ubi
I'm not sure, but I think the use of the word "funky" was banned internationally in 1984. Unless you're into crafts with beads and rope, I'd suggest avoiding the word.
Also, prefixing it with "Tres" is seriously fucked.
"Troll"?? I didn't think Rob was giving moderation points to certified morons these days.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Well, I was at Brown College,
a four-hundred level course in C.S.,
but I didn't have the knowledge,
to build a robot that could play chess.
I asked my lab assistant,
how could I get a passing graaaade?
And he gave me the answer, (yes he did)
he told me that I had the curve made.
So I started stackin', and hackin',
and 'loadin through my modem,
and just when, it hit me,
my classmates turned around and shouted,
"Build that funky robot, white boy!
Build that funky robot riiiiight!
Build that funky robot, white boy!
Lay down some legOS and build that funky robot til you die!"
These robots are all cool but I quickly found my two favorites.
For non-technical reasons, the RoboTender (bartender robot) is by far the coolest. They even make a point of mentioning that this bartender will never cut you off. Pretty cool for a bunch of geeky CS students.
On the technical side, by far the one that impresses me the most is the Bipedal Robot. It starts only understanding 3 basic commands and being fed a random sequence of those commands. Then it uses trial and error in the form of "genetic algorithms" to "learn" how to walk. As an enthusiastic but very amateur programmer, that amazes me.
Anyway, I have to go now. Speaking of bartenders, the wife has been drinking tonight and every time that happens she gets all worked up and "needs" me for something.
(Contrary to popular belief, not everyone on Slashdot is sex starved. That woman's hitting her "prime" and wearing me out!)
Sure, go ahead and buy some mindstorms. Just wait 'til you see the price for Lego alcohol. And I though the bricks were pricy!