Content for Construction

With this series of videos we are looking at FIRST LEGO League 2013 Nature's Fury competition and we are building a robot for accomplishing some of the mission. It would be a tutorial with at least four parts and we are building a complex attachment that could catch, lift and release different parts with only one motor and rubber bands. Not one, not two, but three movements with only one motor. 

Probably the robot I like the most from this series of five robots. See the video to understand why and what is interesting and special about this robot. 

In this tutorial we will build our first 3D LEGO model using LDraw. I will build it using two different programs based on the LDraw library - MLCAD and LeoCAD.

In this second part we continue with the next few tasks from the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) 2013 competition. Using the same rubber band attachment we lift the house and collect a few of the humans and cargoes.

The second construction of the series along with a comparison with the first construction. The new robot requires more parts, but has a few more advantages. 

Part three of the Catapult series is about loading the catapult automatically. We use a gear system with a medium complexity along with a very interesting "clutch" developed with parts entirely from the LEGO Mindstorms NXT kits. As a result, at the end of the video, the Catapult automatically loads and fires.

Based on a request we are showing the robot construction with two rear motors instead of a differential. In this way, as a construction, it is closer to more students, but much more challеnging for programing. 

In this last part of the tutorial we actually lift the rocket modules and prepare them for lauch. First we have to collect them in the right order and them somehow lift them.

We continue from part 3 where we finished part of the 'rear'. Power is transfered from a motor to the wheels but having about 16 gear wheels makes it more than complex for this LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Competition robot. 

Vision is still one of the very few fields where a human being could outsmart a computer. Still. Colour/Light sensors are the cornerstones of implementing a smart LEGO Mindstorms robot that could at least partially do "vision". In this video tutorial, we are using the robotics sensor to detect loading and unloading of the catapult.

We dispay the speed of rotation of the wheels on the brick screen. We use the math blocks to do a proper calculations from rotation to radians per second. Knowing the speed, the radiuses and the mass of the wheels we find energy in Joules accumulated in the construction.

Next robot construction for holding and releasing balls from this container. In this video we discuss the improvements and how to use the chains to release one ball at a time.

In the first part we built our first 3D LEGO model. Today we will smooth the model we have created and go through the process of creating PDF instructions for building it.

Based on your feedback we have decided to show you the live process of building a complex LEGO Mindstorms Competition robot without having the whole robot ready yet. We are continuing from part 1 where we finished part of the 'front' of the robot and we arrived at a construction that we didn`t like and would fix in this video lesson.

Here we continue examining FLL 2014 World Class missions. We show different ways, for putting the insert in place as well as taking the loop from the robotics arm. Some of them are quite specific, which reminds us, that you need to think out of the box, while solving the missions.

The attachment is now so advanced that we can do two tasks at once with it in order to solve the FIRST LEGO League 2014 World Class Search Engine Mission.

Pinless attachments are smart and quick and could make a big differences between two robot constructions. In this video we are sharing a nice idea for a pinless attachment placed below the robot.

Sometimes you could just throw a ball from base and solve a competition. Or at least many teams think so. In this video we would explore a very simple attachment for throwing balls from base. Can you use this for other missions? - we think so. Check out the video. 

(LEGO humans of course, not real humans :) ). Working on World Robotics Olympiad 2014 elementary challenge. Collecting modules, bringing them together and lifting them. A very funny and interesting competition that we would explore in this and the next video tutorials from the series

Based on your feedback we have decided to show you the live process of building a complex LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Competition robot without having the whole robot ready yet. We are continuing from part 2 where we finished the 'front' of the robot and now we will extend it so that we could also attach the rear part.