Computing at School Resource: Lego Junkbot

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.

dancing robots - outreach

For the last few months at lot of the outreach work from the Junkbots project was focused on the exercises based around turning cans into drawing bots or junk clearing bots. On 21st June 2012 the robot programming side of the project was trialled with primary schools.

The Northamptonshire based Nene Lakes Extended Services ran "Chemistry at Work Day" event hosted by Scott Bader, Wollaston and the robot programming was also included as well. The programming idea, an off-shoot of the junkbots project, was for the students to programming an NXT Lego robot to dance using only four commands that allowed the robot to:

• go forward for so many centimetres
• go back for so many centimetres
• go turn right for so many degrees
• go turn left for so many degrees

The structure of the activity was

1. up to 5 minutes introduction to the activity
2. up to 10 minutes as a group of usually up seven; design a dance routine of no more than four moves
3. up to 10 minutes putting the routine on to the robot using a template Java program 
4. up to 10 minutes testing the routine; redesign the routine with up to eight moves, repeat 3
5. remaining time involves forming a large circle putting the groups robot in the centre and watching them preform and saying which is the best and why.

When the instructions are being entered into the computer, the facilitator does the first one and then the students add the remaining instructions themselves and decide which instruction to use, and the first student tells then next student how to do it and so on. The facilitator does the compiling and uploading to the robot largely for speed.

Because of a limited access to the computer to program the robots an extra activity was incorporated - one person reading out the instructions one by one and then one or more members of the group acting out the actions.

Objectives aimed for

• they can write and design programs;
• STEM is fun;
• robots are fun;

Lessons learn by the facilitator - it would be much easier if there was two facilitators!

development of Ad-Hoc Robot Networks

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.