Daniele Benedettelli’s book

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

“Creating Cool Mindstorms NXT Robots” by Daniele Benedettelli has come out with some delay. The author and editor’s wise decision to take their time to do this book has purified the contents and enhanced its quality… which can be only described with the attribute : excellent !

Danny has developed a handful sophisticated LEGO robots to which he gave life through control- and behaviour-based programs. The reader is led through slowly growing degrees of difficulty and complexity from “Quasimodo” to “JohnNXT”, while learning about the essence of NXT C-programming and concepts as diverse as finite state machine, hysteresis, underactuation, line following, Boolean operators, decision tables… All these topics are well-woven to form a balanced patch-work of knowledge that has characterized so many good robot books. You consequently learn by doing.

The author astutely combines NXT-programming with remarkable LEGO studless building in order to realize and describe more and more complex robots. With a note of humour the reader is accompanied through all the designs, where he has the impression of participating in the development of each prototype, which definitely is one of the best didactical choices. The graphics of this book are of high quality.

The absolute high-light of course is JohnNXT, the LEGO incarnation of the famous “Short circuit”-movie robot. Daniele uses two NXTs (pardon : three!) for this project. Two NXTs control the robot and communicate with each other over the RS485 high-speed connection. A third NXT is used in a “Remote Control” project and sends its commands via Bluetooth to the robot. But JohnNXT also can survive quite autonomously through a behaviour-modelled program.

Well done Danny !

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