So yesterday we went to build Lego MindStorm robots for a summer training program for teens in the Catholic University. The goal of the bots is to catch a ball and drop it to the other side of the obstacle. The obstacle looks like this __/\__ So catch the ball in one side, climb and drop it to the other side.

First of all… Lego MindStorm Robolab visual language SUCKS! It is not intuitive for making ifs or whiles or loops, etc… There is no source code available for the program that you load to the robot controller. There is only .vi files which looks like binary files for the robot.

The idea of building a robot and giving some “intelligence” to it is amazing and very fun. The first thing our team did is a car with a bumper where there is one push button sensor on each side of the bumper. I tried to catch the clicks of these sensors to make the robot turn. But since there were no loops or if clauses I cannot limit the robots turn. Instead I tell it to turn 1 secs when the bumper sensor is triggered. (run only the wheels of the triggered bumper sensor side.)Also since there is no loop available after hitting and turning, the program comes to an end.

I`ll check out some Linux implementation of the MindStorm cause I know that there is at least one out there. I`ll keep it updated… Next session is tomorrow (thursday 04/15/04)