Talking Robots with LEGO MindStorms 2004
Software project, Computational Linguistics, 8LP
Lecturers: Alexander Koller and Geert-Jan Kruiff
NEWS
- The final projects of 2004 are finished! In only 7 weeks (plus an
introductory learning phase), three teams of three students each have
designed, built, and implemented three very cool talking robots. See
pictures and movies here: Bartender, Blackjack dealer, Logistics robot.
- Geert-Jan will give a talk on the Talking Lego Robots at COLING 2004 on 23-26
August in Geneva. A PDF
version of the paper is available online.
- We have been featured
on Duke Speaks!, a blog
about speech-related Java resources by Paul Lamere at Sun Labs.
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.
This is the second installment of the highly successful Talking Robots seminar from WS 2002/03. We
might focus the thematic area of the talking robots some more this time, but
haven't fixed a theme yet.
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.
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.
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. It is possible to
learn enough about Java from the Java I
course, plus some self-study.
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.