The University at Albany (SUNY) has highlighted Knuth’s research in a recent news piece.
UAlbany Professor Kevin Knuth with a robot built from LEGOs. (Photo Mark Schmidt)
Kevin Knuth has a laboratory in the physics department of the University at Albany that is filled with LEGOs. The bricks are relatively cheap and can be used to rapidly prototype a robot’s body. Knuth’s robots are being programmed to solve such problems as mapping complex terrain.
At UAlbany Day on Saturday, Oct. 25, he will give a demonstration on Robotics and Robotic Exploration in Life Sciences Room 143 at 10:45 a.m.
I have finally compiled building instructions for my Little Rover, which can be seen above in a 3D Rendering courtesy of POVRay. An earlier version of this rover can be seen in this YouTube video:
The complete detailed building instructions can be found here in this 94-page pdf file.
Warning: it is about 9MB in size. The design is not entirely compatible with the standard NXT Mindstorms Kit. This design relies on two touch sensors, several 1×9 bent liftarms, and as far as I can tell from Peeron, the NXT Kit has only two. This may require a little redesign. Other compatibility issues and their solutions can be found in the Parts List in the instructions.
The main file is called DriveSmart.rbt. Drive Smart runs four threads:
Drive Thread
The Drive Thread (lowest one of the four) drives until a warning flag is set by one of the other
threads. It then waits until it gets an all clear message via the Wait Until Free block, and then
it starts driving again.
Bumper Threads
There are two threads that monitor the bumpers.
The reaction is only activated if nothing else is currently commanding the robot. In this case the
bumper has been pressed and the robot will veer away from the hazard.
Ultrasound Thread
This thread monitors the ultrasound rangefinder.
The reaction is only activated if nothing else is currently commanding the robot. When the robot
comes too close to a hazard, the robot is commanded to stop. It then looks both ways and then turns
in the direction with more room. If the robot is within 10 cm of a hazard on both sides, it then
backs up.
The robot can roam about a wide variety of rooms and not get stuck.
He does not detect stairs though! So be careful.
This site describes how to build with LEGO toys. It is not at all affiliated with LEGO. I have links to LEGO. One can use LEGOs to make robots. This site may be of use to students designing robots in robotics competitions. I would like to add some information on hacking LEGOs and LEGO electronics as well. If appropriate, I will also be adding pages on applying Matlab to developing intelligent systems with the LEGO Mindstorms NXT Robotics Platform.
