Book Image

Smart Robotics with LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor

By : Aaron Maurer
Book Image

Smart Robotics with LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor

By: Aaron Maurer

Overview of this book

LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor is the latest addition to the LEGO MINDSTORMS theme. It features unique designs that you can use to build robots, and also enable you to perform activities using the robot inventor application. You'll begin by exploring the history of LEGO MINDSTORMS, and then delve into various elements of the Inventor kit. Moving on, you'll start working on different projects which will prepare you to build a variety of smart robots. The first robotic project involves designing a claw to grab objects, and helps you to explore how a smart robot is used in everyday life and in industry. The second project revolves around building a working guitar that can be played and modified to meet the needs of the user. As you advance, you'll explore the concept of biomimicry as you discover how to build a scorpion robot. In addition to this, you'll also work on a classic robotic challenge by building a sumobot. Throughout the book, you'll come across a variety of projects that will provide you with hands-on experience in building creative robots, such as building a Dragster, Egg Decorator, and Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants. By the end of this LEGO book, you'll have got to grips with the concepts behind building a robot, and also found creative ways to integrate them using the application based on your creative insights and ideas.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

1998 – LEGO Mindstorms: The Robotics Invention System (RCX)

If we start several years prior to 1998 and look back to 1982, LEGO had a new product line called Technic (have you heard of it?). A few years into this new line of products, LEGO began to work with Seymour Papert (one of my educational heroes) to create programmable LEGO. Papert even has a book called Mindstorms (ironic?). One of Papert's colleagues, named Mitch Resnick (from MIT Lifelong Kindergarten), who I have had the pleasure of meeting, presented a prototype to LEGO in Billund and things started to take shape.

Fast forward to 1998, when LEGO released the Robot Command eXplorer (RCX):

Figure 1.1 – RCX 2.00 brick hub

You'll know this brick as the yellow brick that started a journey unlike any other – a powerful programming device with 32 KB of RAM with no USB (not available to the public until September 1998), no Wi-Fi (cell phones were just emerging with...