Details of the LEGO Junkbot (combining the control of LEGO Mindstorm NXT with Junkbots) can now be found on the Computing At School (CAS) website: http://community.computingatschool.org.uk/resources/3399
The idea behind the LEGO Mindstorms Junkbots is to bring together the motors of the LEGO and use them to power the robot which is otherwise created from junk. The key aims of the project are; - To give children at a KS2 primary school level an insight into what can be achieved through the use of simple programming. - To provide a fun and engaging activity for children to be creative and design their own robots. - To use the robots and programming software to achieve basic movements of the Junkbots.
The original junkbots project combined the idea of using motors and vibrations to move the bots with limited control however the new project uses the idea of programming to add a further element of control and as such the simplicity of the self contained NXT device was decided upon as a branch of this.
Aiming the project at KS1 and KS2 gives the opportunity to introduce basic programming from a young age and demonstrate just one of the interesting possibilities that comes from it.
Developed by Hayden Tetley and Scott Turner. Hayden’s time was paid for through the Nuffield Research Placements Scheme (http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/nuffield-research-placements).
If you'd like to find out more about Computing at the University of Northampton go to: www.computing.northampton.ac.uk. All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with.
Work within the School of Science and Technology, University of Northampton was presented at a recent workshop, Robotics Workshop: Bot Shop! 28th October 2011 at the University of Derby.
The work presented discussed using Lego Robots to support the learning of Neural Networks on an artificial intelligence module.The aim being to use the advantages of using robots, their visual and physical nature, as a way of making the slightly abstract nature of the neurons and multi-layer perceptrons more concrete by examples.
For more details on the Workshop go to: http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/events/displayevent.php?id=260
Neeraj Jalan
The dissertation presents the project of integrating and analyzing of communication behaviors into a group of Lego robots, interacting with each other, with the help of wireless communication medium in Bluetooth. The purpose of the work is to create the ad-hoc network of Lego robots, by the use of this wireless technology, and introduce the elements of Behavior Based robotics. The fact that Mindstorms NXT systems (Lego robots) support Bluetooth enabled communication, means these systems can be used as a basis for creating complex, communicating artifact for introducing behaviors in them. The report has also focused on gathering the background information about the NXT system forming a good prototype of robots, and its great flexibility with LeJOS NXJ as programming platform. The result is implementation of developed work, using Lego Mindstorms NXT as robots, and LeJOS NXJ as programming environment. The task was approached with Lego robots fetching the information from environment, and other Lego robots as input; and processing this information to produce an output, to move in a purposive way in a group. It was noticed that implementation of several behaviors to single Lego based ad-hoc network had shortcomings, due to the complexities with the communication technology and limitations of the NXT systems. Thus, more than one Lego based ad-hoc network was implemented to demonstrate the combination of two or behaviors successfully.
