The robot in action, following a line :)

Author: Asmo Soinio, asmo@kortis.to, 8.8.2002 (contact information updated 14.10.2005)

Overview

My project was to create a robot that could be controlled from Matlab and that has a camera. An additional need was that the robot could be controlled from a PC running Windows 2000. This documentation is written for anyone whom is interested in doing something similar. The programs I wrote can be downloaded from the download page.

The Lego Mindstorms Robotic Invention System seemed to be an affordable way to create the robot. I didn't find any interface to communicate with the Mindstorms robot from Matlab, so I used a Java-Lego-Network-Protocol -interface that I edited to suit my needs. Java objects can be directly used from Matlab. The robot itself uses legOS (nowadays known as brickOS) as it's operating system. The camera is the one that comes with the Lego Vision Command-kit.

I had troubles with the PC-software provided by Lego, as it isn't compatible with Windows 2000. That didn't cause any problems, though, because none of the PC-software by Lego company is used.

Update 25.07.2003: My legOS program fails atleast with brickos-0.2.6.10, so please use legOS 0.2.4, which is the one I used

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