Lego Robotics Workshop

July 22-24, 2002

The Lego Robotics Workshop being held July 22-24 at the Troy Junior Museum is for children aged 11-14. The goal is to use robotics as a medium to expose schoolchildren to engineering design and computer programming. Activities include a hands-on introduction to the Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System (version 2.0) and a tour of robotics labs at RPI. Participants will build and program wheeled and legged robots.

The schedule is:

Monday, July 22: Introduction to Mindstorms (9am-noon)
Tuesday, July 23: Mindstorms programming challenges (9am-noon), tour of RPI robotics labs (1-3pm)
Wednesday, July 24: More fun with Mindstorms (9am-noon)

This workshop is organized by Prof. Srinivas Akella (RPI) and Joe Herwick (Junior Museum). Our crew of robotics experts includes Ben Potsaid and Prof. Wes Huang , also of RPI.

Participants are:

Samuel Axten
Joseph "J.T." Breen
Nate Brown
William Feldhusen
Chas Furman
James Kolb
Kyle Moise

Movie of 2002 Workshop (30MB) , Low resolution version (11MB) : Both are in AVI format, use DivX codec.

Support for the Robotics Workshop is provided in part by the Troy Junior Museum , Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the National Science Foundation through CAREER Award No. IIS-0093233. Thanks to DotCIO and Academic and Research Computing at RPI for providing laptops, and the folks at CIPCE for advice and encouragement.

Lego Mindstorms Resources

The official Lego Mindstorms site
The Vision Command set is a camera system for Mindstorms
Here is a detailed description of the RCX.
NQC is a C-like language to program the RCX.
Dave Baum's Lego site
Links to interesting Lego Mindstorms sites
CIPCE at RPI is developing robotics programs for local schools.
CEEO at Tufts University is developing educational programs using ROBOLAB
A comparison of Mindstorms and ROBOLAB

Books on Lego Mindstorms

Places to buy Lego stuff

Toys R Us sells the Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System version 2.0 (Lego #3804) for $200.
Pitsco Lego Dacta , with Robolab links and more Robolab links
They sell the remote control (Lego part #9738, $20) as well as an Infrared tower with a serial cable (Lego part #9713?, $29) in case you don't have a USB port on your computer. You can also buy Vision Command (Lego #9731, $50) from them.
Lego Shop at Home
They carry the Ultimate Accessory Set (Lego part #3801, $50), which includes a remote control, a touch sensor, and a rotation sensor among other things.

Srinivas Akella
Department of Computer Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
110 8th Street
Troy, NY 12180
Email: sakella@cs.rpi.edu