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is grateful to have the great opportunity of researching robots for his work again from
2000.
In 1985, he was first introduced to LEGO robots by a friend of his who had
recently returned from the Media Lab with some LEGO educational products. Influenced
also by Dr. Seymour Papert’s book, MINDSTORMS: Children, Computers, and Powerful
Ideas, he feels that LEGOs offer a hands-on approach to learning that is often missing
these days in our digital world. His robot in this book, the CyberArm, is the result of
much trial and error on his part.Also, he was a contributing author for 10 Cool LEGO
MINDSTORMS Dark Side Robots,Transports, and Creatures:Amazing Projects You Can Build
in Under an Hour (Syngress Publishing, ISBN: 1-931836-59-0).
Hideaki would like to thank Catherine Nolan, Cherina Sparks and Luke Ma,
because they appreciated his vision and helped him by editing his clumsy writing. He
would also like to thank all those people who help his writing and encourage him as fol-
lows: Jonathan Babcock, Brian Bagnall, J.P. Brown, Ralph Hempel, Jin Sato, Christopher
Smith, Russell Stoll, Edmund Nussbaum, STELARC, Shinichi Kurita, Prof.Yoshikazu
Suematsu, Noriko Kageyama,Yoichi Tagi, Masanori Konno, Prof. Masashi Shimizu,
Yoshihito Isogawa and all of the co-authors of this book, particularly Mario Ferrari.
Lastly, Hideaki would like to give his deepest thanks for the support of his mother, Rei,
and his dear wife and son, Keiko and Kei. Hideaki has a dream that one day the people
on this planet will be able to join hands with biped robots as friends.

Luke Ma received his bachelor’s of Arts degree in Music and Computer Science from
Brown University in May 2003. He is currently a starving graduate student studying at
the University of California, Santa Barbara. His main field is music theory and thus he
continues to spend most of his time analyzing pieces of obscure classical music in even
more obscure ways. He has also been known to play the piano as well as sing poorly on
occasion. On the technological side of things, Luke has worked for Latitude
Communications Inc. as an engineering intern, helping them develop and expand their
Web-conferencing platform. He also has extensive experience in designing and pub-
lishing Web sites. He is a contributor to Syngress Publishing’s 10 Cool LEGO Mindstorms
Robotics Invention System 2 Projects:Amazing Projects You Can Build in Under an Hour (ISBN:
1-931836-61-2 ). He is fluent in C/C++, JavaScript, HTML/DHTML, Chinese, English,
and hopefully French, German, and Japanese sometime in the near future. Luke would
like to thank Catherine Nolan of Syngress for all her help (again!) and the opportunity to
work with Syngress and to Joda for his input and for writing a wonderful chapter. Luke
would also like to thank his parents for their support and his friends for putting up with
him and making his life fun and enjoyable.

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