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)

2006 – LEGO Mindstorms NXT

Cue the fond memories of the gray and orange NXT robotics kit. Heading back in time, I vividly remember hosting my first robotics summer camp for students when I found out I had access to seven of these kits. This was also the time when I first dipped my toe into the FIRST LEGO League:

Figure 1.2 – LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick

In 2006, LEGO updated the robot line with the NXT. I am sure many of you remember, recognize, or have fond memories of using the NXT. There were two versions of this kit, retail (8527) and educational (9797). Additionally, the kits had an upgrade to NXT 2.0 (8547). More importantly, the programming interface was LabVIEW, which is what many of us grew to love with the NXT and EV3. It was also with this robotic kit that there started to be a huge list of various programming languages made available by third parties if you did not want to use block-based coding.

In 2009, LEGO upgraded this kit with...