Page 17 - The Unofficial Guide to Lego Mindstorms Robots

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The sophisticated hobbyist can do all of these things alone. But you have to be determined and have a lot of free time and
money. There are a couple of ways to make things easier:

• You could buy a prebuilt robot brain. Some companies sell kits that are designed specifically to be used as robot brains. This
approach saves you the trouble of selecting a microprocessor and getting it running, but you still have to select sensors and
actuators and attach them to the brain somehow.

• You could use a modular construction kit to build the robot's body. LEGO® bricks are one possibility—in fact, researchers
and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been using LEGO bricks for mechanical prototyping for
over a decade.

An even better simplication, of course, is the MINDSTORMS™ Robotics Invention System itself.

What Is Mindstorms?

MINDSTORMS is the name of a product line sold by The LEGO Group. The LEGO Group has a handful of product lines that
cater to different age groups, some of which are shown in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1. Representative LEGO Product Lines

Product Line Name Suggested Ages

LEGO® PRIMO™ 3 months to 24 months

LEGO® DUPLO™ 18 months to 6 years

LEGO® SYSTEM™ 3 years to 12 years

LEGO® TECHNIC™ 7 years to 16 years

LEGO® MINDSTORMS™ 11 years and older

The centerpiece of MINDSTORMS is the Robotics Invention System (RIS), a set for building robots. It makes the challenges
and excitement of mobile robotics accessible to anyone with $200US and a desktop computer (PC). It gives you a chance to
solve problems in innovative ways. Best of all, it's a lot of fun.

The RIS set eliminates many of the difficulties of building mobile robots:

• The set comes with a robot brain called the RCX.∗ The RCX is a small computer that is neatly packaged in a palm-sized
LEGO brick.

∗ Some people think RCX stands for Robotic Controller X. According to the MINDSTORMS web site, RCX stands for
Robotic Command Explorer.