AJAX Remote Controlled Lego Robot
AJAX taking control of the real world
For those of you who haven’t seen Virtuosity, it's about a computer program finding a way to enter the real physical world and start killing real physical people.
This article describes how AJAX can be used to control a real physical Lego robot in real-time.
Although my little innocent Lego car is far off from coming close to being a serial killer, it will be fascinating to see how killer apps will be able to control and remote control things through AJAX and other web technologies in a couple of years
For any potential police officer watching, those are vanilla soda cream bottles in the background and not beer bottles. I would never drink and drive :) This is photo of the little bugger resting after all that driving 
slashdotThis article describes how AJAX can be used to control a real physical Lego robot in real-time.
Although my little innocent Lego car is far off from coming close to being a serial killer, it will be fascinating to see how killer apps will be able to control and remote control things through AJAX and other web technologies in a couple of years
AJAX Robot #1
Sorry, I don't have any flashy name for it, it's simply AJAX Robot #1 (not to be confused with Johnny #5).The setup is all pretty simple.
- A gumstix connex computer running Linux and a webserver with CGI (Common Gateway Interface).
- Some low level c code to do input mixing and giving control outputs to the Lego motors.
- A static HTML page as an AJAX control panel.
- A compact flash 802.11b wireless card.
AJAX Control Panel
This is how the control panel looks like on the page hosted on the robot. Try moving your mouse pointer over the square (no worries the AJAX request has been disabled). If the control panel is not intuitive enough, here's how to control it- At the center, radius = 0, motors stops
- Increase distance to center, r > 0, motor(s) moves
- 0 < atan2(y,x) < PI/2, go forward
- -PI/2 < atan2(y,x) <0 , go backwards
double f(double x) { return cos(2*(x-PI/2)); }
Maiden Voyage
This is how the Maiden Voyage looked like. The video is kind of lame but is truly the Maiden Voyage!AJAX Robot #2 Coming soon
As a heads up, if time allows I'm planning to attach an onboard camera and make the #1's webserver accessable through the internet for EVERYONE TO AJAX REMOTE CONTROL. Stay tuned!AJAX Robot #3 Planned
Also a #3 is planned which is gonna be waaaaaay cool! Stay double tuned!
Posted by Wael Chatila on July 13, 2006 4:00:33 AM PDT
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Re: AJAX Remote Controlled Lego Robot
Very cool. Nothing new about the hardware, but the Ajax interface is REALLY sweet! my only problem with it is that putting a lot of requests on a low-MHz system is a) latent and b) can slow the other tasks. How delayed does the ajax interface feel?
Once again, very cool. Congrats, and don't get /.ed!
Re: AJAX Remote Controlled Lego Robot
I am launcing a website soon called RC-XBot
Here
Which will have a publicly accessible internet controlled lego robot on it. Admitadly it isn't based on this tutorial, I used Python and Java with a Flash front end but its still fun to play with. The site will hopefully be on-line by March 2009.
Here
Which will have a publicly accessible internet controlled lego robot on it. Admitadly it isn't based on this tutorial, I used Python and Java with a Flash front end but its still fun to play with. The site will hopefully be on-line by March 2009.