Climber

Climber - One day while browsing the LEGO Mindstorms site, I noticed some pictures about a show in Germany. LEGO had built 2 cool wall climbing robots to help market the product. I was amazed at the design and capabilities that they had and wanted to find out just how hard it would be to build something like this and have it actually work. It was quite a challenge. Building the components was the easy…
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Spaz

Spaz is my take on the famous LegWay robot first built by Steve Hassenplug. The version here is not quite the same as Steve's, but more like the one built by Philo called "Yet Another LegWay". The difference being, I did not have the special distance sensors that LegWay uses. Instead, Philo built a version that uses the regular Lego light sensors. (more…)
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RopeClimber

Rope Climber has been built for the rtlToronto Lego Robotics Event - Rope Climbing.  In a nutshell - build a robot that can find and climb a rope.  Sounds easy right?  Not!  In the tradition of rtlToronto, there are some interesting rules to make this more challenging.  First off - the robot must fit within a 8x8x8 square on start.  The trick - the rope is hanging 12 inches off the ground.  The robot must…
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PicoCam

PicoCam was built as a proof of concept.  Its purpose was simple, navigate an area using typical avoidance routines while capturing live wireless video/audio and transmitting it to a receiver. The was never really completed because I had other ideas   The pictures shown here are of the final version, with working navigation, but I did not bother going the last step to get the live video to display (even though it will work). (more…)
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TrackerBot

You would think I have a template for "room-navigating" TrackerBot evolved from the recent PicoCam robot I created.  After I had finished PicoCam, I decided I wanted to try something with tracks.  TrackerBot and PicoCam share similar intelligence, with TrackerBot having some slight improvements.  The general idea is that it will navigate a room using a variety of sensory input for obstacle avoidance.  There are 3 Cybermaster touch sensors, 1 DIRP light sensor and 1…
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BigWheel

Big Wheel (BW) was an experiment at building a robot that uses the HailFire Driod (StarWars) large wheels. It's job is simple; build an autonomous robot that can navigate any area while avoiding obstacles by not hitting them in the first place. To do this, BW uses a DIRPD sensor to "see" left, right and center. This allows BW avoide obstacles from 3 views before actually hitting them. (more…)
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TiltBot

Sept. 06: Pete @ Techno-Stuff has just sent me another new sensor from Techno-Stuff. This time it's a Accelleration / Tilt sensor. Instead of going into great detail on how it works, I will quote from his site: " The Accel Sensor lets your robot measure it's acceleration. The sensor can also be used to measure tilt. This is a two channel device that lets you measure acceleration or tilt along two perpendicular axis. Acceleration…
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FireBot

One of my early projects was to build a fire extinguishing robot. I did this using the parts I had at the time. It was based on a walker platform and used a pneumatic circut to "blow" the fire out when detected. It worked reasonably well with the provided light sensor. Recently, I discovered the PIR (Passive Infrared Sensor) from TechnoStuff. This sensor was built to detect infrared heat and seemed to be a good…
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Johnny 5

Johnny5 was built more as a test to see how similar I could build him out of lego.  Programming on Johnny5 was simply line following with object avoidance via touch sensors at the front. His hands and head would also move in a pre-defined pattern.  The pneumatics are there for visual effects.  They serve no function on this model. Rate This Post:
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DTM

This is my LEGO ??dpi (25 I think) DTM scanner. The DTM works via a combination of RCX-based code done in NQC / RCXCC, and a program made in Visual Basic (5). RCX - The RCX is responsible for scanning a line, and populating its datalog with pixel values and then sending a signal for the PC to upload this data. The RCX then waits for the PC to send a signal back to continue.…
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