The Lego robot
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| Home | Our Robot | The Ship | Compiling programs | Lejos Home | Mindstorms |
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The LEGO robot is part of the LEGO Mindstorms set.
This set is based around a special brick called the RCX. The
RCX contains a microprocessor, three inputs and three
outputs. There is also some firmware on the RCX that you may
think of as being like the operating system on a PC. LEGO
provide a standard firmware with the RCX but this is rather
basic and does not allow us to create the sort of programs
that we would like. We have therefore replaced this firmware
with one of many free open-source alternatives. The
particular system we are using is called Lejos. Lejos is
actually a very small implementation of a Java virtual
machine. This means that the programs that we write to
control the robot are actually written in Java.
LEGO robots are quite simple in that they just react to the
values that they receive from their sensors. Part of this
reaction may be to send signals to one of the RCX's outputs to
control the direction and speed of a motor. The sorts of
Sensor that we have with our current system are:
There are also three motors with the set which can be set to turn forwards or backwards at one of seven speed levels. The types of robots that you can build with the mindstorms set are practically unlimited. However because we are focusing on the programming of the robot's logic we have already created a robot that has some nice features. Here are some pictures of our initial model. |
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RCX and MINDSTORMS are trademarks of the LEGO company. |