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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."
In my "Advanced Architechture" course at university, we got to build robots out of mindstorms as well... had to find their way around a maze and other various tasks. Interesting entries. Definately cool and a fun semester.
University - a box of academia nuts.
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.
Subscribe to the lego-robotics mailing list.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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.
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!)
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. =)
h -mindstorms.slashdot.org. We'd also have 25 stories a day posted to that section. Nothing new here that is worth seeing.
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-wit
A TCP/IP enabled RCX? Now that's cool!