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)

2013 – LEGO Mindstorms EV3

We now enter the era of LEGO robotics when almost everyone reading this book spent more hours than they care to admit building, programming, and designing robots using the LEGO EV3. Whether you build as a hobby as a child or Adult Fan of LEGO (AFOL), enter competitions such as FIRST LEGO League, teach in education settings, or simply just love using LEGO to bring ideas to life, we can all agree that the EV3 is a rather robust robotic kit that allows the builder to accomplish just about anything:

Figure 1.3 – LEGO Mindstorms EV3 brick

Because this kit has been around for a while, and also due to its popularity, there are so many third-party sensors and add-ons available that the sky is truly the limit when it comes to designing ideas.

Just like the NXT, LEGO released two versions of this kit. There was the retail version and the educational version. Again, builders used a version of LabVIEW to program, but recently...