Lego Mindstorms Robots

Lego sell a robotics kit called "LEGO Mindstorms". It has about 700 parts for making simple programmable robots, based around their RCX, which is a controller with three input ports (touch and light sensors etc.) and three output ports (motors etc.). The RCX is similar to the MIT Programmable Brick. It is based around a Hitachi 16MHz single-chip microcomputer with 32K of usable RAM.

Official LEGO Mindstorms site.
The Unofficial Guide to LEGO MINDSTORMS[tm] Robots, by Jonathan B. Knudsen 1st Edition, O'Reilly, October 1999 covers many languages for programming the robots, ways of building new sensors etc.
Forbes Newspaper article about LEGOs attitude toward non-LEGO code development. and about one of the LEGO engineers who has built some pretty amazing robots!
legOS (an alternative operating system for Mindstorms)
There is also a software emulator for it.
NQC (Not Quite C): A Programming Language for Mindstorms.
LEGO Mindstorms Internals (Heaps of General Info here too).
Kekoa Proudfoot's RCX Internals page.
Wes' Mindstorms page.
Todd's LEGO Mindstorms FAQ
Bot-Kit is a Smalltalk interface to Mindstorms!
I've written a prototype version of a Starlog compiler that generates NQC programs for RCX. So far, I've only used it for simple robots, like the Pathfinder, which tries to stay within a white area (it backs up and turns each time it gets off the white). Watch this space...

An alternative to Lego Robotics, is the fischertechnik robot kits, which are distributed by Procon Technology in Australia. They have more sophisticated sensor and output devices, at a slightly higher cost.

marku@cs.waikato.ac.nz

Last modified: Thu Oct 17 17:35:51 NZDT 2002