Touched, Released, Bumped. These are the basic three states of the LEGO Mindstorms touch sensors both in EV3 and NXT versions of the robots.
Building instructions for the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Catapult. The robot has a motor, a clutch to control it for manual shooting and a touch sensor for automatic loading. The bottom base is removed which means the Catapult could not be turned around. Nevertheless, the baseless robot is small enough to be built in class.
Build from LEGO EV3 Core and Expansion set this robot looks like a scorpion. The Scorpion strikes, when it sees a pray with the ultrasonic sensor and you can use the touch sensor and the rotation sensor to control the spike movement. It has a scissor mechanism at the back using a system of gears and levers.
Geldautomaat, from German, means ATM.
This is the last robot from the 3.0 course book in the LEGO Mindstorms Curriculum. It uses a Touch Sensor to sense if there is a card inside. When touched, a Medium Motor starts spinning and pulls the card inside its chamber, where a Color Sensor reads the data from the card.
NOTE: There is a step, where you have to place the "credit card" inside. It may seem unnecessary and pointless, but otherwise, you will not have proper support for the next steps and the construction will crumble.
Don't we all love animals? But it is sometimes difficult to have a puppy at home. Presenting to you - the Puppy robot (drums in the back). It has some of the benefits of a Puppy - it is small, it can follow you with the Ultrasonic Sensor and it can bark (if you program it to). Follow the building instructions. Use it at home or at class.
Again a LEGO animal. This time it looks like an ant. It's interesting that this robot has no wheels and moves in a way very different from the rest of the "wheel robots".
There is much to be learned about mechanics from the way animals move. Ants are a good example. In the real world, an ant could carry a load of 20x its mass. It would be interesting to see how much load could this robot carry? Try it.
Playing Football with robots is extremely fun. It could be part of the classes, it could be part of demonstration days. The Striker is a robot for handling the ball and attacking the goalkeeper.
This is a Camel-like robot. We demonstrate an interesting use of gears to make the Camel walk. Fun and entertaining way to learn how to transform motion.
These are building instruction for a working automatic catapult with a motor and a touch sensor.
This is a LEGO Mindstorms Boxing robot. The inspiration story goes like this "One day we though - Let's play SUMO at this robotics demonstration, but let's make it more interesting. Let's play sumo with Humanoid Robots". We decided to build a boxing robot. The goal of the robot is to press the touch sensor on the other robot and it could be very fun. Perfect robot for demonstration. It is controlled by a joystick using the Bluetooth connection.
Here are the joystick and the programs for the joystick and the robots.
The building instructions are for a robot that kind of looks like the Spy Bot but it has treads instead of wheels. Like a Tank. Tank Spy Bot. Treads are always funny and you could use the robot chassis base to extend with additional attachments and tools.
The kinesthetic and memory game works with a program you can download from here. In these instructions you will see the 7 modules from which it is built:
This robot is meant to be very modular and to enable its owner to upgrade it and modify it.
Rollbar is a handy device, which only purpose is to measure lengths. Its main purpose is to measure curved lines.
It's designed for right-handed people, but with some small adjustments, it could fit any palm.
"Bot. Spy Bot."
Many of us are fascinated by the idea of spies. Movies for "spies" are also very popular and if you haven't watched them check out the 007 movies. These here are building instructions for a LEGO Mindstorms robot with two touch sensors and one ultrasonic. It could be used as a spy - sneaking closer to you and detecting if you move or if you touch it. The whole idea for this robot came from NXT when there were sound sensors. Currently, there are no sound sensors in the EV3 set, but the robot could again be quite fun to program.
This is a very funny robotics hand with 3 fingers that you could put on your hand to "Rule the World". It's funny to control it with the touch sensors.
Instructions for building remote control. It uses the rotation sensor to determine the steering and touch sensor for handling the movement. Find building instructions for a suitable chassis here.
Together the controller and the car look like this:
The Laboratory is a robot that tests your programming skills. You will have to measure the volume of a balloon, only by the values you receive from the sensors.
It has a valve, that allows you to deflate your balloon at different rates.
How to place the balloon in the robot is explained in this tutorial.
This is the joystick for controlling Real Steel LEGO Boxing Robot. We use the bluetooth connection for communication between the two bricks.
This is an attachment for the cases where you need a two touch bumper sensors. It could be placed on almost any LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robot.