4th seminar 23.11

At this seminar we shared our achievements in robot development. Most of groups were building their robots and they showed us their robot design. As we have almost nothing to build, we described what we are going to do (see previous post) and our first experience in NXT progrsmming for the LeJOS operating system. We wrote a very symple program just to test how motors and sensors are working. Our robot walks forward until it sees any obsticles and if so, it stops and kicks the obsticle by his tail. Also he makes a kick when you touch his sensor at tail. Well, as our project is programming-oriented, we almost first whi started programming and I did not hear from any group that they have used LeJOS.

Last Friday we had no class, but we’ve stared working on our project, so I still have what to write about. The topic of our project is “Robots programming using mobile devices”. We do not need to construct something by ourselves so we took already built Lego Mindstorm NXT robot, called Spike. We found later that there are several mistakes in its structure, so we had to remake it a little. Anyway, fixing wrong structure of robot without any additional parts is not as interesting as creation of robot from scratch. But we really have no enough time for playing with it. I would rather prefer to get a box with such Lego to play with at Christmas holidays :)

Let’s go back to our project work. First time we decided to make a programming environment for a pocket PC, which allow writing code in some language and then send it to the NXT device via Bluetooth. We have some guy at our department who developed some Java IDE for pocket PC devices. Also, there is a Java Virtual Machine for Lego NXT devices which allows programming Lego robots in Java. So we had an idea to extend Java IDE for pocket PC so it could be used for NXT programming. We assumed that the main difficulty will be to send compiled code to the NXT brick via Bluetooth. The idea was great, but after taking a look on how LeJOS programs are compiled and sent in Windows platform we found that the proper compilation of a program is even more challenging than Bluetooth communication. The problem is that there is a couple of third-party software which is used to create binary file in addition to the Java compiler. Porting this process to the pocket PC platform is not trivial task.

Thus, the first idea failed. It is good, but again we have no time to implement such project. So we decided to reduce our project from remote programming to the remote control of NXT robot. We are going to create a flexible mobile application which can be used to control NXT robot with LeJOS installed. The application should allow binding any action on mobile phone keypad. We found that there are still no such solutions available for the LeJOS platform (I believe that there are some but authors do not distribute them).

The work on our project is just started. We installed and configured all required software for programming in Java ME; Installed LeJOS to our robot; Wrote several simple programs for the robot to get some idea how to program NXT brick. Actually, I have some experience in working with Bluetooth on mobile phones, so I hope we should not get any big problems with it.

3rd lecture 9.11

It was not a lecture but rather a workshop where we showed our presentations about what we had done during last week. It was a little bit frustrating because we've got the letter saying that we have to make a presentations only one day before the class and before this letter we had not known that we should make any progress in area, that we have chosen. We even did not choose the concrete topic we are going to do. So we made a small presentation where we wrote our ideas of what can be done in 'remote robots programming using mobile devices' and what are approaches that already available in the Internet. Luckily, lecturer gave us few ideas and now we are almost ready to state the topic of our project.

2nd lecture 2.11

At this class lecturer introduced us to the Lego MINDSTORM platform and different programming environment for it. We wrote and tested few trivial programs first using Lego graphical language and then using some alternative C-like language. In both solutions programming is event-based and intuitive. At the end of a lecture we divided in small groups and chose a topic of our project. We chose 'Remote robots programming using mobile devices' or something like that.

1st lecture 26.10

We discussed general things about robots and also tried to imagine how robots can be used in education. I didn't know anything new from this lecture, because we discussed well known things. I was really surprised to see 3 Laws of Robotics, which I read from Isaac Asimov's book. I wonder if those are used in real life.