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)

Summary

To wrap up this chapter, let's do a quick review of what we covered. We explored the overall look of the new LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit. We examined the parts and elements that come with the kit, along with the sensors. Additionally, we took some time to look at the programming software.

Now that we have a basic understanding of the kit and some featured elements, let's finally get to the building of robots. Let's take what we have learned to start building some fun smart robots to challenge our thinking and creativity.

If you have not taken the time to build any of the five robots that are in the software, I would encourage you to take some time to build them and explore the ideas shared. None of these builds are required for the builds in this book, but they do provide a good foundation for the parts and building.

A few of these builds will reference certain build features from these five builds to showcase how these ideas inspire new ideas.

In the next chapter, we will start with a robot arm and claw, a classic build that is always great to build to explore the parts, programming, and use of sensors.