We received a brand-new Textrix set from LEGO Education. The students started to get familiar with the stuff. Just playing a bit, observing the tutorial, etc.

First comments:

1. Excellent material
2. Needs habile hands, so targets high-school kids
3. see the photos:

Next session: build a dual-drive robot base.

Idea for a challenge: Build a robot that may explore the Luxembourg "Casemates" equiped with a camera! Cool idea.

This took a long time, because we still worked on "Serendipity". The Mantis robot is ready and tested:

The idea now is to realize an exploration robot for the Luxembourg Casemates.

Brainstorming of the Casemates exploration robot

(Note that a casemate is a vaulted chamber of a fortress. As Luxembourg-City was a famous citadel, fortified by Vauban, the town has a lot of such chambers.)

• The "Convict Episcopal" boarding institution is built on top of the ancient "Fort Rheinsheim". There exist casemates below the cellar, which nobody has entered for at least 20 years.
• ==> The idea is to have an exploration robot that can investigate these casemates.
• The robot must be able to circumvent obstacles, pass staircases, step over garbage and stones.
• Therefore it must be equipped with a sensor that gives information about the orientation in the gravitational field.
• We could get some inspiration from insects:
  • make a 4- or 6-legged bug
  • this is relaistic, because we can use up to 6 servo-motors with one Tetrix controller
  • we need a valuable mechanism for locomotion (study Chebychev-linkage, or Jansen mechanism.)
  • find a way to coordinate the legs
• Imagine all the possible positions that the robot may experience, in order to know how it must be designed
• Add a turnable camera and (infrared) lamp: life pictures send to the operators.
• The robot must be semi-autonomous:
  • steerable by the operators
  • however, the robot must be able to detect illicit movements that might cause serious troubles
  • it must be able to solve the terrain problems autonomously
• The robot should draw a map of its motion: use a compass and dead reckoning
• We have no idea yet, if the communication can be done by radio, or acoustic (eventually subsonic) signals, or whether we need a wired connection.
• We will probably use LEGO pieces with the Tetrix metallic parts: ==> hybrid robot.
• The robot will have a secret mission that we will only make publically available after the final mission. (We hope that no information about this mission will slip through!!)