The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor’s Guide

I recently added a funny video of Tag-Bot, the robot from Chapter 14 of The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor’s Guide. Check it out below. For one part of the video, I stuck my camcorder (which is very small) onto Tag-Bot’s “head” with the aid of some special “glue dots.” Using this approach, I was able to get some video of what it looks like from the robot’s perspective!

I’ve put together some video of Guard-Bot, the robot from Chapter 15 of The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor’s Guide. As noted in the book, an interesting characteristic of this six-legged walking robot is that it uses two independent motors to power the legs, and each motor powers a set of three legs on its side. Normally, this would result in the robot’s legs eventually becoming unsynchronized (which would make walking very difficult–or humorous!). However, using the built-in rotation sensors in the NXT servo motors enables the robot’s legs to stay synchronized quite well.