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MindStorms Madness

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the liberal-arts dept.

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."

5 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bird Course! by Wergythu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm a Brown ugrad who saw the walker demoed...the cool thing about it was not that it walked, but that it started with no knowledge of how to walk (ie used random movements) and over a series of attempts learned which sequence maximized distance travelled per step. (Obviously there were some constraints placed on the movements so that it couldn't fall over or break itself.)

  2. Re:Mindstorms + CS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why do you go to a university where they only work with Mindstorms? Wouldn't it be much better for you if you were working with real robots?

  3. Re:Mindstorms + CS by bugg · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Why don't mindstorms classify as real robots? CS is CS, regardless of the platform.

    If this were a robotics class in an EE department, I'd be troubled. CS? What's the problem?

    --
    -bugg
  4. Re:Funky. by MisterBlister · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Foo!

    As long as George Clinton walks the earth, the word funky is SOLID!

    Prepare to get funkified!

  5. Boooring by cscx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Honestly, I don't see why this is front page material. I programmed Lego Mindstorms in C using legOS in one of my intro to engineering classes. The difference was that instead of the sole requirement of "being really cool," ours actually had to perform a specific task; i.e., autonomously maneuver through a 10x10 ft maze while keeping accurate track of distance and perform various tasks. We were graded on our ability to complete the task, and the amount of time required to complete the task, not solely "was it cool or not," although that was a part of it. Oh yeah, and the code. =)

    The big headache was that you had to compensate for the shitty quality control in the Lego components whose tolerances are so absurdly wide that it's just ridiculous. Also, you have to work within the restrictions of a certain number Lego parts, with little to no modification. It's more of a challenge than "see how many legos and custom sensors you can buy/make."

    My point is, however, that if everyone who has worked with Mindstorms submitted their stories and pictures to Slashdot, we'd need a dedicated section called http://diaries-of-college-students-who-worked-with -mindstorms.slashdot.org. We'd also have 25 stories a day posted to that section. Nothing new here that is worth seeing.

    A TCP/IP enabled RCX? Now that's cool!