Robotics Monday: Model Factory

Name of Model: Lego factory project v2.0 - Demonstration at LegoWorld 2010 (Zwolle, The Netherlands)

Created by: DrywFiltiarn (Martijn Bosgraaf)

Found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgj9cZtW2Fs

Details: It seems like just a few weeks ago that we were talking about an NXT robot that could print LDRAW designs. We've also seen an NXT-based warehouse for gathering parts, based on the LEGO company's own warehouse. Now, we see a bizarre combination of the two - a 5-NXT factory (staffed with minifigures to "drive" the various motorized parts) that gets parts out of a warehouse and then builds with them using designs generated from LEGO Digital Designer files. The choice of LDD instead of LDraw (like in the previous model-building 'bot) does limit things in a way, but any loss there is made up for by the ability to handle a large and easily changed set of parts. The warehouse contains 95 different types of bricks - over 1500 pieces total to build with. Most impressively, this entire thing was built and programmed in less than 5 months - it was only started in June of 2010. To see some work-in-progress and behind-the-scenes footage, look at the builder's other YouTube uploads. Here's what the whole LEGOWORLD set-up of this factory looked like (click to "enbiggen"):