Introduction to Build Your Own Teams of Robots with LEGO Mindstorms NXT and Bluetooth by Cameron Hughes, Tracey Hughes, Trevor Watkins and Bob Kramer book
Even though we may be able to get a robot to do many different things and perform different tasks, we will never be able to build a single robot that can perform every task or do everything imaginable. Even a general-purpose robot is limited by the number or types of sensors it has or by the types of end effectors it possesses. We may only have access to a stationary robot where a mobile robot is needed. It might be determined that a four-wheeled tractor has the required type of mobility, and as it turns out, the robot we have is bipedal or has been designed with only two wheels. But we can’t go too far in the other direction either. It’s not practical or possible to build a different robot for every task or for every scenario we require. First, building a robot requires time, and the parts are costly. Sensors can be expensive.
We wouldn’t want to build one robot to turn off the lights and a separate robot to turn on the lights. There would be a lot of unnecessary duplication. However, we could dismantle the robot we have to build the robot we need. We really don’t like this option, though. After we have put in the time and effort to build a robot and test it, and it does what we want it to do, we’re usually happy, and we keep it. So what is the solution? We don’t want to build a new robot for every task that pops up, and we don’t want to dismantle a perfectly good working robot that already serves one purpose in order to do some new task. Sometimes we’re lucky and we have a third alternative.
Build Your Own Teams of Robots with LEGO Mindstorms NXT and Bluetooth PDF Download
We might have a robot that seeks and reports the positions of red things, and we might have another robot that retrieves tennis balls. What if we needed a robot that could retrieve apples from the backyard that had fallen from the tree? We could reprogram our tennis ball retrieval robot to look for apples instead of tennis balls. But we still need our tennis ball retrieval robot, so that option is no good. We could reprogram it to retrieve tennis balls and apples, but that would slow it down because now it has to determine whether it is sensing an apple or a tennis ball, and it works just fine at the speed it has. So that’s no good. Likewise, we could reprogram our robot that reports red things, but the problem is that robot works just fine the way it is as well. In this book we present a third alternative: robot teamwork.
Let’s get the robot that finds red things to work together with the robot that retrieves tennis balls to create a robot application that retrieves apples (red ones, of course) from the backyard. This approach does require multiple robots to be involved in the solution, but it has the advantage of not having to totally reprogram or dismantle a working robot. In this book we introduce the Bluetooth Robotic-Oriented Network (BRON). BRON is a communication technique that allows teamwork between two or more robots.
Build Your Own Teams of Robots with LEGO® Mindstorms® NXT and Bluetooth® 1st Edition Pdf
BRON allows robots to share sensors, actuators, end effectors, motor power, and programming in order to accomplish as a team what they could not do individually. Rather than having to totally repurpose a robot or build a completely new robot from scratch, BRON allows you to use existing robots to work in teams to perform tasks that they were not originally designed to perform as individuals. With BRON, we use each robot to do what it is designed to do, and by adding communications between the robots, we can get the team of robots to do new things.
Download Build Your Own Teams of Robots with LEGO Mindstorms NXT and Bluetooth by Cameron Hughes, Tracey Hughes, Trevor Watkins and Bob Kramer in free pdf format.
