NEW YORK – It’s fun when a collection of plastic parts seems to have personality.
I put together a robot with Lego’s new Mindstorms NXT kit, set it on the kitchen floor, and watched it trundle forward on its rubber wheels until it sensed an obstacle (a cabinet). It backed up, swung left, then proceeded on its new course, till it sensed the next impediment.
“It’s like a little man!” said my girlfriend.
That’s the charm of robotics – seeing something of ourselves, however basic, in an inanimate object.
Most robot toys, however, are designed to do only one or a couple of things, and get boring quickly. Their charm often doesn’t outlive the first set of batteries.
The Lego Mindstorms kit, which first appeared in 1998, is different. It lets you design and build a variety of robots.
Enthusiasts, many of them adults, have used it to build robots that sort Lego bricks by color, dispense soft drinks, or climb stairs. One Dane even turned it into a low-resolution scanner that took 3 to 4 hours to scan a CD cover.
The latest version of Mindstorms, which will appear in stores Tuesday priced at $249.99, is a complete revamp that makes it easier to build more kinds of mechanical friends.
The basic principle is still the same: A large central “brick” houses the brain and batteries. Four sensors and three motors connect by cables to the brick. The set is rounded out with hundreds of Lego pieces from the “Technic” series, which includes wheels, struts, cogs, axles and the like.
The sensor that allowed the “little man” to avoid colliding with the cabinet was the ultrasonic one, which sends out inaudible sounds and listens for the echo. It can tell the distance to the nearest object to within an inch.
The other sensors are: a microphone that can measure sound to within the decibel; a touch sensor and a light sensor that can shine a beam to determine the reflectivity of an object in front of it, or measure how bright a room is.
But the major improvement over the earlier Mindstorms is the new brick, which unlike the previous model has a large LCD display. With the help of four buttons, the user can create simple programs right on the brick – that’s how I told my robot to back up and turn when it noticed an obstacle.
More complex programming still needs to be done on the computer, but the IR transmitter has been replaced with a USB cable and Bluetooth wireless.
For all its quality, it’s possible to quibble with the kit. Not everything works the way you think it will. A simple program, suggested by the manual, that I think was supposed to make the robot start and stop when it heard a loud noise, didn’t work because the sound sensor picked up the whirr of the robot’s motors.
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