Believe it or not, there already is a LEGO NXT book.
Amazon has changed their book search policy so you’ll need to sign up for the book search program to sample the book before purchasing it. A little inconvinient but it is a great feature. Check it out:
LEGO annouced that it will make the NXT available in Japan for educational purpose in September. General availability will be in October:
ENFIELD, Conn. (May 1, 2006) – The LEGO Group today announced that for the first time it will release as open source the firmware of the LEGO® MINDSTORMS® microprocessor – the new NXT brick – the core component of its next generation robotics toolset. Additionally, the company announced that it will release Software, Hardware and Bluetooth Developer Kits to its growing global audience of robotics enthusiasts. The firmware code and three developer kits will be available in August 2006 in the “Extreme” section of www.mindstorms.com, in conjunction with the retail availability of LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT.
Check out this aircraft carrier build with LEGO bricks:
AircraftCarrier in Minifig Size Harry S. Truman
Check out this cool self balancing robot. My guess is that the coding part is easier to write than you’d think. The balancing act itself is surely a show stopper if you want to impress your friend. Another trick about creating a self-balancing robot is to put most of the weight on top. The more weight the robot has on top, the higher the angular inertia it has which gives your code more time to calculate and adjust against the fall.
What’s the best Christmas gift for your love one when both of you are robotics geeks? For me and Lisa, I got the hint from her last Christmas that she wanted an iRobot - the robotic vacuum cleaner that I initially thought was quite impractical - and she did eventually got the iRobot Scheduler.
Turns out that Svetlana in Zurich actually built a LEGO robot vacuum cleaner using the RCX and wrote a paper about it: http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/publ/papers/domnitch_ubicomp2004.pdf Very interesting! Maybe I should have asked my wife to build one herself with our RCX instead.
In some ways, the RCX is quite limited. That’s one reason why our RCX is sitting in our closet a lot. But with the NXT, I think more and more robotic enthusiasts will start to have the capability to prototype sufficiently sophisticated robots. The driver behind it will the programming model and tools. The NXT hardware by itself will not be sufficient in convincing people to build cool bot. But with Microsoft Visual Studio Express in the picture, the future becomes very much clearer! You can read more about using Microsoft Visual Studio Express (one more FREE tool from Microsoft!!!) to program the NXT on Jim’s theNXTstep and on on Jeff’s NXTbot (links on the side bar). I believe under the supportive mindset of LEGO’s marketing team, NXT+VS will florish and NXT adpotion will sky rocket. Anyone wants my RCX in the closet? 
Other than the Roomba RCX-clone, I also like some of the Segway clones out there: you can build a Segway yourself with parts list and instructions from http://www.tlb.org/scooter.html Just be extremely careful when test driving your scooter. Don’t say that I didn’t warn you There is also an RC version built by some Georgia Tech guys. Video at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5074120639358874539&q=segway&pl=true
New Scooba from iRobot
Lastly, the lastest iRobot vacuum is now the “Scooba Floor Washing Robot” which Cnet has a review of at: http://news.com.com/1606-2-6022442.html The Scooba doesn’t have the scheduler function and if you have carpeted floors, the Scooba wouldn’t work there. We love our Roomba and it actually works pretty good. But if you are considering the Roomba for kicks, I’d say bank the money for now and get an RCX because someone is bound to hack out an open source version of the Roomba code for the RCX. And an RCX-Roomba would be more fun to play with.
I have been notified that my google map related blogs were not appropriate for this blog. I agree and I’d like to offer my apology and an explaination. To start, I have trimmed those blog entries.
I started this blog because I am interested in technical things geeks like including robotics and programming. That was why we did the Google Map site. In fact we simply wanted to create a map application with a database backend that contains a healthy number of points on Google Map and dating databases happens to meet that criteria. Looking back, we actually created a real estate map site first but pulled out because of legal reasons.
On a personal note, I am happily married with 2 young kids myself, so dating is definately not my game :)
If you are interested in the technical side of the project, check out the API we used: Google’s API at http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ and Yahoo’s geocoding API at http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html.
I’d seriously consider creating a LEGO related Google Map. If you have great ideas, please send them my way
Just came a cross some pictures related to the robot video in one of my previous blogs. Apparent the fighting machine itself is remotely controlled by someone wearing a “robot control suit”!
Source: http://isobe.typepad.com/robotphotos/
Here’s another “robot suit” concept but instead of being a sensor suit for controlling a remote robot, it is used to assist human being carry out heavy duty tasks. I believe the US Army also has a working prototype of a similar suit which I probably read about on Wired but it looked like a distance prototype back then: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/ironmen.html But the Japanese counter part looks pretty real:
Source: http://www.thegreenhead.com/technology/2005/06/hal-5-robot-suit-enhances-human-power.php
Human are not the only thing cloned into robots. Here’s are two more REALLY cool video of actual (future) millitary animals:
The horse/dog: http://www.bostondynamics.com/dist/BigDog_Feb-26-2006.wmv
The “roach”: http://www.bostondynamics.com/dist/mpeg/RiSE_Aug-8-2005.wmv
These Boston Dynamics’ robots are almost identical to some old robots we used to see at the MIT AI Lab. Upon some investigation, I’ve confirmed that the founder Marc Raibert was indeed a EE/CS professor at MIT from 1986-1993.
If you are into general robotics, here’s a fine blog that has a lot of cool robotic news:
The usual excuse: work is busy and my software design specification has to be done by the end of month and Beta customers are coming in for training in May. So I am tied up there.
Another reason: I did a fun Google Map project which took me a month and half to do plan and program. It is coded using (1) Google Map API (2) Yahoo’s Geo-coding web service (3) hotOrNot’s web service. The site is at: http://www.mapluv.com/hotornot
I absolutely can’t believe when I saw this robot video. The robots in the video looks so realistic and fight almost like a real human being. You have to see it to believe it:
http://www.yourfilehost.com/media.php?cat=video&file=fightingrobots.wmv