LEGO MINDSTORMS

In this video lesson I am building a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 active attachment powered by a small gear wheel. The attachment could move up and down, it is very useful for collecting objects. It could easily be adapted and used on other robots.

We are making a parallel with Video Lesson 56 from the series and we are also showing ways to improve the stability of an axle which is most of the time neglected, but could lead to great problems.

The third robot has the brick and motors placed vertically. This is quite unusual and difficult, but the construction is very powerful because it saves space.

In this video we are showing how to use two light sensors to do basic aligning on a black line. This is always needed at the competitions. We also show an example for following a line with two sensors. 

Based on your feedback we have decided to show you the live process of building a complex LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Competition robot without having the whole robot ready yet. We are continuing from part 2 where we finished the 'front' of the robot and now we will extend it so that we could also attach the rear part. 

This second part continues with importing two previously developed in Episode 53 blocks into our program. With them we can for align to lines. We program the robot to align to the cross line and start following it.

We list the number of decisions that the robot is making while following the line. Then, we group them and decide on the number of sensors to be used.

This robot could quite possibly be build from a single EV3 core and EV3 resource sets. It uses fewer parts and only three motors. There are additional parts that could be skipped when building the robot and we have added these parts only as to make the construction more complete. 

Without the use of any motor, you can still accomplish a number of missions using passive attachments. You can still pull/push on different levers using only a beam or two connected to the frame.

We discuss the state of "Lost" and the different ways we could escape this state. We also build the next step of our State machine programming pattern where the next state is determined by the previous state.