1. Introduction

Introduction

It's a box! It's a robot! It's a box robot.  Box robots are very popular on different robotics competitions involving LEGO Mindstorms like the FIRST LEGO League or World Robotics Olympiad. Let's start with a brief introduction and continue in the next videos with explanation on the features of the robot and why such robots are frequently used.

We have provided the building instructions for this robot as part of the whole course  Box Robots for competition (this will require a course subscription)  

Box Robot Building Instructions. Part 1

The first part of a box robot chassis for robotics competitions. The robot is quite large and this is why we split it into two parts - to make it easier to construct it. This is the second part

The robot is built with LEGO Mindstorms EV3, with an additional part for the walls used in the second part.

Box Robot Building Instructions. Part 2

Second part of the building instructions for this LEGO Mindstorms EV3 competition robot chassis

Align and adding attachments

With the shape of a box it is very easy to align this robot to different wall and to add very stable pinless attachments to it. The goal of the video is to discuss this feature of this particular robot construction.

Pinless Attachments

We have discussed pinless attachments a number of times at FLLCasts and will discuss it in the next part of the course

Aligning to Walls

It is important to use the walls to align the robot and fix its position during competitions

We have provided the building instructions for this robot as part of the whole course 

Box Robots for competition (this will require a course subscription)

Brick Accessibility and Cable Management

Sometimes robot builders are so overwhelmed with the process of constructing a robot that they forget two very important parts. The brick should be accessible and the cables should not get in the way. These are referred by us as Brick Accessibility and Cable Management.    

We have provided the building instructions for this robot as part of the whole course 

Box Robots for competition (this will require a course subscription)

Requirements for additional parts

This video discusses the fact the robot requires a few more parts that are available in the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robotics sets. We have a number of other constructions that require less parts, but for this particular robot construction we have decided to go beyond the standard sets, cheaply buy a few more parts and build a whole box robot with them. 

Buying LEGO parts

What you could do is search the Internet for "lego parts sale". We are not in any way connected with any of the sites, but we have used mainly BrickLink in the past for the times when we needed some additional parts.

Where do we have the additional parts from

Most of the part we have are collected over the years and we have hundreds of thousands of lego parts. It now occurs to me that for some of the competitions of FIRST LEGO League we have 15-20 fields and this is where most of the parts come from. We, however, do not like to use them because we understand our unique position of having so many parts. These robots make a little exception.

We have provided the building instructions for this robot as part of the whole course 

Box Robots for competition (this will require a course subscription)

The additional parts that you need:

LEGO Technic Flat Panel 5 x 11 (64782) - about 15 of them

 

User of motors

In this video we look at the way this robot uses the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 motors. How are they attached and the what the rotation of the motor is transferred to the attachments.

We have provided the building instructions for this robot as part of the whole course 

Box Robots for competition (this will require a course subscription)

Balance the robot to handle heavier attachments

In this episode we look at the way this robot is balanced. A well-balanced robot could handle heavier attachments without losing track of its position on the robotics competition field. 

We have provided the building instructions for this robot as part of the whole course 

Box Robots for competition (this will require a course subscription)