Final Year Project - "Technical Lego Robot Entertainment Device"

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Project Title Author / Institution
Technical Lego Robot Entertainment Device Christiane Ischebeck, Coventry University , United Kingdom

In her Final Year Project "Technical Lego Robot Entertainment Device", Christiane Ischebeck developed a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT entertainment robot and evaluated the usage of two different programming software environments (NXT-G, and RWTH - Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB) for her application. The project was submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of European Engineering and was supervised by the Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Coventry University, United Kingdom.

Abstract

This report is about LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT. LEGO MINDSTORMS is a LEGO set to build robots, vehicles or animals. The project concentrates on a LEGO MINDSTORMS robot, which should dance, say some words and play a melody. At the beginning, a vehicle was built to learn how to use the MINDSTORMS software. After learning the main components of the software, a robot was built. The next step was the programming of the robot with the LEGO software to make the robot walk, move its arms and head, show a picture (for example a heart) on its display and play some sounds or speak some words. A USB-cable was used for data transfer. Finally, this robot is programmed with MATLAB and a toolbox of RWTH Aachen, a german university. For this tool, a Bluetooth connection is used instead of the USB-cable. This report describes the building, programming and the difficulties with the NXT software and MATLAB in conjunction with the toolbox. The biggest problems caused are the legs of the robot for walking and the Bluetooth connection. It is very difficult to make the robot walk properly with only one motor for each leg. Another problem is the Bluetooth connection between the robot and the PC because of the time to get the connection working. Summarised it can be said that it is not so easy to make the robot walk. With only two motors, the robot can move but it shuffles and does not lift up its feet. The conclusion of this project is that the LEGO software is very easy to learn and program, but with a more complex program such as MATLAB and an adequate toolbox there are more possibilities in programming the robot.

- 23th April 2008 -