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Doug is presenting — in a new, improved version — in this chapter.This vehicle is
based on a special kind of triangular wheel, called tri-star wheel sets, that are actually
made of three wheels placed at the vertexes of an equilateral triangle.This is a device
that you have to see it in action to believe what it’s capable of!
Masterpiece 2 Learning Brick Sorter, by Mario Ferrari. For my contribu-
tion to this book, I chose a project which admittedly is not an entirely new idea. In
fact, I had already published a similar project on my Web page in 1999 (www.mario-
ferrari.org). However, apart from being one of my favorite projects, this robot aroused
a lot of interest and I received many e-mails asking for details about the building
steps and programming instructions.The Learning Brick Sorter has even been used as
a starting point for a few graduate theses.This interest, made me think that it would
be a good candidate to appear in this book, offering the reader the opportunity to
have a look at the intriguing world of Artificial Intelligence.The Learning Brick
Sorter is probably the most software-centered model of LEGO MINDSTORMS
Masterpieces, but for readers who are already familiar with the robot you’ll note that
this current iteration has been entirely re-designed and re-programmed.
Masterpiece 3 The LEGO Turing Machine, by Giulio Ferrari. When I
described the efforts that writing Building Robots with LEGO MINDSTORMS
required at the beginning of this Foreword — I should have used the plural, as my
brother Giulio held up half of the strain. In this chapter, Giulio presents a LEGO
version of the Turing Machine, a computing machine devised by the famous mathe-
matician Alan Turing and a pillar of modern theory of computation.This device is
usually considered a theoretical representation, a sort of mental experiment, to
demonstrate what a computing machine can and cannot do. However, it can be actu-
ally built, and Giulio’s version is the starting point for a captivating journey into the
world of calculus and into the mind of a mathematical genius.
Masterpiece 4 PneumADDic II, by Kevin Clague. I got in touch with
Kevin by e-mail for the first time in April 2002, about one year before the publica-
tion of this book.Though I had been spending many hours browsing the Internet for
sites about LEGO robotics, until that moment I had unbelievably missed Kevin’s
page, a true gold mine of original ideas and clever implementations
(www.users.qwest.net/~kclague). I fell in love immediately with his pneumatic
adding machine, the same one you’ll find in this chapter in a revised and improved
shape.As I previously explained, this project is not only very interesting on its own,
but also contains a collection of tips and techniques that are fundamental tools for
any serious Mindstormer.

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