Talking Robots with LEGO MindStorms 2002
NEW! We have a paper about the Talking Robots
project at the COLING 2004
conference (link to PDF version). The paper
describes the basic system and the student projects.
NEW! The Talking Robots project goes into its
second round. Check out the webpage of Talking Robots 2004!
Software project, Computational Linguistics, 8LP
In books, and in the movies, robots always talk. But in practice, they
rarely do ... The goal of this course is to explore the possibilities
of combining two fields, namely robotics and computational
linguistics, to create robots that can communicate. The task is
for teams of students to build "interesting" (cool!) robots using LEGO
MindStorms, and then couple these robots to a dialog system including
speech-recognition and speech-synthesis.
We provide LEGO MindStorms kits and the tools for building spoken
dialog systems. We have also developed a framework that hides most
technical details of the creation of new talking robots and have reimplemented the Talking Elevator as a
demonstrator in this framework.
What the students need to provide is creativity and ingenuity!
LEGO MindStorms
On the robotics side, we use Lego MindStorms. The Lego
Robotics Invention System lets one create robots using the familiar
Lego bricks. At the heart of the robot is a programmable Lego
computer, the RCX, which controls the robot's sensors and
micro-motors. To program robots, we make use of the Lejos Java virtual machine
for the RCX.
LEGO Germany has kindly provided us with four Robotics Invention
System kits and four Ultimate Builders kits, for the purpose of
this course.
Lecturers, and course outline
The course is given by Alexander Koller
and Geert-Jan Kruijff.
For a more detailed outline, see our course plan.
Enrollment, prerequisites
Because we only have enough sets for four teams, up to 12 students can
enroll (3 per team).
Prior experience with programming in JAVA would be a plus.
In order to be able to run all the software, each team must have
access to at least one PC that has a USB interface and runs a version
of Windows that supports this. Yes, it must be a PC that runs Windows.