LEGO MINDSTORMS - The Unofficial Guide to Robots - Jonathan B. Knudsen Part 1 ppt

[...]... MINDSTORMS is the name of a product line sold by The LEGO Group The LEGO Group has a handful of product lines that cater to different age groups, some of which are shown in Table 1- 1 Table 1- 1 Representative LEGO Product Lines Product Line Name Suggested Ages LEGO PRIMO™ 3 months to 24 months LEGO DUPLO™ 18 months to 6 years LEGO SYSTEM™ 3 years to 12 years LEGO TECHNIC™ 7 years to 16 years LEGO MINDSTORMS ... You could build a comparable setup by buying the pieces separately, but it would cost more and would not be nearly as easy to use 8 Meet the RCX The RCX is a robot brain in the form of a bulky LEGO brick Figure 1 2 shows a photograph of the top of the RCX Figure 1- 1 Basic MINDSTORMS setup Figure 1- 2 The RCX, a robot brain The RCX is a small computer with the following features: outputs Three output... snapping LEGO bricks together • The set also includes two motors Like the sensors, they can be connected to the RCX by just snapping LEGO bricks together • The RCX uses six standard AA batteries for power It also includes a power jack You can supply power in either polarity, even AC, from 9V to 12 V • The set includes more than 700 LEGO pieces that you can use to build the body of the robot • You can... expertise: • The electrical engineer still has to select sensors and actuators and wire them to the microprocessor These parts are inexpensive and can be bought from hobby stores or electronics part stores • The computer programmer still needs a pretty low-level understanding of the microprocessor and the attached sensors and actuators • You still need a mechanical engineer to design the robot's body 6 The. .. electrical engineer chooses the brain, sensors, and maybe the actuators, and wires them all together This person probably selects the power supply, as well • A mechanical engineer designs the body and possibly selects the actuators The mechanical person needs to be familiar with the other components of the robot (brain, sensors, actuators, and power supply) so that everything fits together mechanically • A... Download the program to the robot 4 Run the program This is only a sketch of the process, of course; it's likely you'll repeat the steps many times as you gradually improve the mechanical design and software of your robot You can create a program on your PC using the MINDSTORMS software Then you need to download it to the RCX using the IR link Once the program is downloaded, your robot is ready to go... source supplies the juice needed to run the brain, actuators, and sensors For example, think about a robot that spraypaints cars in a factory Its brain is probably a garden-variety desktop computer The body is a big arm with a paint sprayer at the end The actuators are motors or pneumatic pistons that move the arm around Position and rotation sensors are used so the robot knows where the sprayer is... http://www.activrobots.com/ ), and Ben Williamson provided insightful and authoritative feedback on a draft of this book Thanks also to Stephan Somogyi for encouraging me to include more information about using a Macintosh with MINDSTORMS 1 1 Welcome to MINDSTORMS In this chapter: • What Is a Robot? • Mobile Robots • What Is MINDSTORMS? • What Now? • Online Resources This is a book about creating robots with the. .. robot people like to tease the big robot people for building tremendously large, tremendously expensive machines that don't have the dexterity of a six-month-old baby The little robot people make small mobile robots based around inexpensive, off -the- shelf parts They like to see themselves as mavericks, achieving decent results at a fraction of the cost and complexity of big robotics One of the interesting... robot's body is simply the physical chassis that holds the other pieces of the robot together 3 Actuators allow the robot to move These are usually motors, although there are many other possibilities, such as hydraulic pistons 4 Sensors give a robot information about its environment A touch sensor, for example, can tell a robot that it has come in contact with something else The last component is not . Input 11 2 Where Am I? 11 3 Online Resources 11 5 6. pbFORTH 11 6 Replacement Firmware 11 6 pbFORTH Overview 11 7 About Forth 12 1 pbFORTH Words 12 6 An Expensive Thermometer. from the use of the information contained herein. ISBN: 1- 5 659 2-6 9 2-7 [12 /99] [M] vii Table of Contents Preface xi 1. Welcome to MINDSTORMS 1 What Is a Robot? 2 Mobile Robots. class="bi x0 y0 w1 h1" alt="" iii The Unofficial Guide to LEGO MINDSTORMS Robots Jonathan B. Knudsen O’REILLY Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Paris • Sebastopol