Lesson 11

Duration of activity: 2.75 hours

Group members participating: Thomas, Rasmus, Peter

The Goal of the session...: Find end course project.

Proposal 1:
LegWay
Try to build a LEGO car that can balance on two wheels. Inspiration can be found in LegWay.

We have found a movie which presents this concept: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3vDnwwBmgQ

Materials:
Only one nxt is needed, along with a couple of wheels...

Challenge:
Trying out different approaches to see which ones work (Bang-Bang, PID...). Possibly getting the LegWay to follow a line while balancing.

Expected progress:
A linefollowing LegWay.

Proposal 2:
Light Follower
Try to build a 2 LEGO cars. One of them will follow second one with source of light. Second could have a predefined route, or it could just be driving around at random. Possibly the light carrying robot, could be remote controlled by bluetooth.

We have found a movie which presents this concept: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jLxJuel9EQ

Materials:
Two nxt's needed.
Light source.

Challenge:
Behaviour of the robot following the light. Breitenberg? Other...?
Possibly following bluetooth beacon instead of light.

Expected progress:
A robot following another robot, that carries a light/a beacon.


Proposal 3:
LEGO Boids
Build a flock of robots, that display emergent flock behaviour.

Materials:
A lot (at least ten) nxt's.
Something to transmit/receive position information (possibly bluetooth).

Challenge:
Getting enough nxt's. Triangulation/navigation.

Expected progress:
Diffucult to say. Depends on the capabilities of bluetooth triangulation.


Proposal 4:
Evolutionary robots
Build a flock of robots, that will learn to drive towards a light source by an evolutionary model inspired by this work on embodied evolution. Experimenting with different fitness models.

Materials:
quite a few nxt's. a strong light source.

Challenge:
Communication between robots, getting enough nxts.

Expected progress:
Reaching behavoir that is better that randomly driving around.

Proposal 5 (this is the one we are going to do):

Reasons for choosing this:
We think the project is funny, and we like the fact that it is interactive. A lot of the other projects, seem too large to complete, or it seems to us that LEGO is not a good medium for building fine mechanics.

Musical robots
Build a robot that plays music. The robot should be interactive, in the sense that a user should be able to tap out rythms, set the tempo and change the pitch of the music, by means of various sensors. Possibly a second robot could be built, that can react to the music played by the first robot.

One might imagine using a touch sensor to tap a rythm. Using the actuators to set tempo (reading the number of ticks pr. second, when the user manually spins the actuator). And setting the pitch of a melody, by using a distance sensor.

Materials:
One - three nxt's:
One or two for grabbing input/playing sounds.
One for reacting on the music produced.

Challenges:
Using the sound class in the nxt. Simulating many tracks playing at once. Analyzing sound (detecting bpm).

Architecture:
We are going to use the lejos platform to program the software, and build the actual robots using LEGO.

We have considered using some external loudspeakers, but we might try to play the music using analog instruments instead (beat by banging on the table, flute by pumping hydralic piston, etc...).

Expected progress:
Playing user-defined music with up to three tracks. Possibly we will build some instruments and try too get the robot to play them.