Author: Christoph Bartneck

The Robot Engine Used For A LEGO Arduino Robot

We build a new LEGO robot based on the popular LEGO flash lights. We use custom made 3D printed parts to put small servo motors into its head, chest, arms and legs. The robot has six degrees of freedom. In addition we embedded a camera, microphone and speakers into the robot. The robot is controlled through an Arduino micro-controller. We used The Robot Engine to create animations for the robot and to design interactions with users. The paper will be presented at the Ro-Man2015 conference in Kobe.

Here are some useful resources for you if you intend to build a similar robot:

The credit for this robot go to:

  • Shogo Nishiguchi
  • Guillaume Vandenbor
  • Marius Soucy
  • Kevin Fleuret
  • Eduardo B. Sandoval

Scholarships available for Master of Human Interface Technology

We are delighted to announce that application for Master of Human Interface Technology and its scholarships are open for July intake in 2015.

The Master of Human Interface Technology (MHIT) programme aims to teach students Human Interface Technology skills and how they can be applied in a research or industry setting. The programme directly engages with industry through projects and scholarship, allowing students to work on real world problems while receiving industry funding. In this way the MHIT degree provides an ideal background for work as an interface designer, or for further study in the field.

The MHIT degree can be completed full-time over 12 to 18 months and this includes three months of taught course work with 9 to 15 months of applied research work.
For this year’s July intake there are six scholarships available:

  • Biomass Mobile Application NZD$12,000 – funded by CRCSI Australia
  • Gesture Interaction in AR/VR systems NZD$24,000 – funded by MBIE, New Zealand
  • Improving the User Experience of the Spike Application NZD$ 10,000 – funded by IkeGS
  • Developing a Reconstruction Application for the Electric Utility Industry NZD$ 10,000 – funded by IkeGPS
  • Volume Estimation from Object Piles NZD$ 10,000- funded by IkeGPS
  • MHIT Scholarship For Speech Database GUI Design – NZD$ 17,000

You can find more details regarding the MHIT programme and scholarships at HITLab NZ official website http://hitlabnz.org/index.php/jobs

If you have any inquiries, please contact us on info@hitlabnz.org

The 2014 LEGO Minifigure Catalog is now available

It is my pleasure to announce that the 2014 LEGO Minifigure Catalog is now available. It contains more than 650 Minifigures with detailed photographs and meta data. The book is a whopping 192 pages. I have limited the distribution options to Amazon and hence was able to reduce the price to only $32 USD. This is the biggest year book so far and I dare to say my best one so far.

The book is available for purchase at CreateSpace and at Amazon.com and as an eBook from Lulu. The App will be updated in due time.

Review Dexter DLight for LEGO Mindstorms

Dexter Industries offers the DLight for LEGO Mindstorms. It allows you to control four full color LEDs through a sensor port of your EV3 or NXT. The first thing to do is to set the toggle switches on each LED to a unique address, so that you can control each LED individually. In the NXT-G environment you can still decide to control all of them at the same time if desired. The biggest nuisance is that only the first LED can use its red component. The other three cannot show any red light. Dexter acknowledges this bug in its forum and offers refunds. It is ridiculous that Dexter does not warn its customers on its product page, in particular since they do not intend to fix this problem.

LEGO Volvo 42030 Loader with SBrick

Today I finally had the chance to unpack and test my SBrick. I build this Bluetooth LEGO Power Functions brick into my Volvo 42030 Loader. A profile for this LEGO model was already available in SBricks social profile database. I could just download the profile and configure it. Configuration entails defining what motor is attached to what port. You can also invert the direction of each motor if necessary. Once the profile is downloaded an configured, it works like a charm. The best part is the proportional control. You can steer a little bit right. With the IR control from LEGO it is all or nothing control.