RWTH - Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB

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NEW: RWTH - Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB v2.03 now available! (optimized motor control)

Welcome to the RWTH - Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB®. This toolbox is developed to control LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT robots with MATLAB via a wireless Bluetooth connection or via USB. This software is a free open source product and is subject to the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE (GPL). The development of the RWTH - Mindstorms NXT Toolbox was motivated by a  RWTH Aachen University student project - MATLAB meets LEGO Mindstorms - for electrical engineering students and therefore designed mainly for education purposes.

The toolbox functions are based on the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Bluetooth Communication Protocol to control the intelligent NXT Brick via a wireless Bluetooth connection or via USB. Although a Bluetooth connection is not recommended for a real-time robot controlling in general (because of its high latency) this toolbox provides MATLAB functions to interact with a robot directly. Latencies via USB connections are much smaller and allow for more sophisticated applications.

The main advantage of this remote control concept enables you to combine robot applications with complex mathematical operations and visualizations within MATLAB. This toolbox opens unlimited possibilities to provide the robots artifical intelligence and other improvements using the manifold MATLAB features and calculations for digital signal processing.

MATLAB meets LEGO Mindstorms - First Semester Student Laboratory

Institute of Imaging & Computer Vision
RWTH Aachen University

http://www.lfb.rwth-aachen.de/mindstorms

The RWTH Aachen University first semester student laboratory - MATLAB meets LEGO Mindstorms - has been established since winter 2007 as a required course for Bachelor of Science students of Electrical Engineering, Information Technology and Technical Computer Science. In this lab the students learn how to use MATLAB for digital signal processing. Based on known mathematical basics the students perform signal measurements and analyse the characteristics of the different LEGO Mindstorms NXT actors and sensors in the first half of the project. In the second half they are motivated to develop and program their own robots. As the pictures below illustrates a first impression, the individual and creative ideas of the students for their robots e.g. maze solver, morse en- and decoder and scanner robots, are unlimited. In winter 2007 over 300 students and 60 supervisors participated in this project and developed and programmed 100 robots based on the RWTH - Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB. For more information please visit the project page  http://www.lfb.rwth-aachen.de/mindstorms or contact the organisators at the  Institute of Imaging & Computer Vision - http://www.lfb.rwth-aachen.de.

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Authors

Project members:

Linus Atorf	linus.atorf(at)rwth-aachen.de
Alexander Behrens	behrens(at)lfb.rwth-aachen.de
Achim Knepper	knepper(at)lfb.rwth-aachen.de
Robert Schwann	schwann(at)eecs.rwth-aachen.de
Rainer Schnitzler	rsch(at)eecs.rtwh-aachen.de
Johannes Ballé	balle(at)ient.rwth-aachen.de
Thomas Herold	herold(at)iem.rwth-aachen.de
Aulis Telle	telle(at)ind.rwth-aachen.de

Organisators:

Alexander Behrens

behrens(at)lfb.rwth-aachen.de

Faculty:
Prof. Til Aach, Prof. Tobias G. Noll

Testers:
Marian Walter, Axel Cordes

Project Server Administration:

André Bell

bell(at)lfb.rwth-aachen.de

Contributors:
Laurent Vaylet, Vital van Reeven, Bernd Neumann, Yvonne Nix, Sacha Franssen

Most contributors are members of the RWTH Aachen University -  http://www.rwth-aachen.de
RWTH Aachen University Student Project - MATLAB meets LEGO Mindstorms -  http://www.lfb.rwth-aachen.de/mindstorms.

Copyrights

The RWTH - Mindstorms NXT Toolbox is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

The RWTH - Mindstorms NXT Toolbox is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with the
RWTH - Mindstorms NXT Toolbox. If not, see < http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.