Logo Robotics Projects

Over the years participants in the Logo Robotics Summer Institutes have designed and built wide variety of projects. Here are a few examples. 

Scanners

One motor runs a mechanism that feeds paper through this machine while another moves a light sensor across the page.

The letter "J" on the piece of paper paper in the machine has been read, displayed on the computer screen, and then printed out on the pages sitting in the foreground.

Vehicles

LEGO cars have always been popular projects in the Logo Robotics Institutes. With the development of the Programmable Brick, a LEGO brick with a small computer inside, these devices no longer had to be attached to the computer with wires.

In the image on the right, Kathy Pike shines a flashlight at her light-seeking car, built using a prototype Programmable Brick that was developed at MIT.

The car's behavior was inspired by the book Vehicles, by Valentino Braitenberg.

With the 1999 Logo Robotics Institutes we began using the RCX, which is now commercially available from LEGO as part of the LEGO Mindstorms™ product line.

These bricks can communicate with each other via infrared transmitters and receivers, much the way a television remote works. Minh Rosen uses one Yellow Brick to control a car that is built around another Brick.

	Joanne Thomas built two creatures that communicate with each other. She programmed them to interact with each other in different ways.

Some of the other robotics projects have been:

• A robot arm that picks up LEGO bricks and drops them in one bin or another depending on their color. Color differences can be detected by using a reflected light sensor.
• Elevators that stop when they sense that they are at a floor. Some versions of this project have used touch sensors, while others rely on light
• Vehicles that follow a line on the floor or stay within a bounded region.
• Vehicles that seek each other out, communicating with light or infrared signals.
• And there's the creature at the right, who claims to be "Miss Programmed"