Guy and Seth on Simulink

September 23rd, 2010

A Balancing Robot, Simulink and the Virtual Conference

Blogger, Guy RouleauBy Guy Rouleau

I used to play with Lego’s as a kid, and when I learned about the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit I decided, "I have to get one!" Years have past since that thought, but when I saw a demo using Simulink to program the NXT brick, I finally made the move to buy it. The first thing I did after unpacking the kit was to install the Embedded Coder Robot NXT software (available from MATLAB Central)!

If you search for "NXT" on MATLAB Central, you will find a collection of models and detailed instructions on how to build some really amazing robots. I downloaded and built the NXT-Way GS, a two-wheeled self-balancing robot.

The Lego Mindstorm NXT Simulink model for the NXTWay GS

So right now I have a NXT-Way doing laps around the test pad provided by Lego next to me while I am writing that post... pretty cool! This is the perfect platform to learn Model-Based Design, and I wish I had a kit like this when I was in school.

Where can I learn more?

MathWorks Virtual conference

If you are interested to learn more about how to program Legos using Simulink, I reccomend attending the talk by my colleague from Mathworks Japan, Takashi Chikamasa. His talk is part of an academic track in the MATLAB Virtual Conference 2010 next Tuesday, September 28.

Look at the conference schedule and abstracts to get the list of presentations. Don't worry if a presentation is not in your time zone, the presentations will be available on-demand after the presentation and Q&A session is complete.

Personally I don't want to miss Choosing the Right Modeling Language by Steve Miller and From Simulation to Experimental Hardware by Ethan Woodruff. For those interested in production code generation, I recommend Code Generation Time Machine: A Guided Journey from Rapid Prototyping to Mass Production by Tom Erkkinen

Now it's your turn

What sessions will you attend at the virtual conference? Leave a comment here.

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By Guy Rouleau

02:23 UTC | Posted in Community, Fun | Permalink | 1 Comment »

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One Response to “A Balancing Robot, Simulink and the Virtual Conference”

  1. Arkapravo replied on September 23rd, 2010 at 06:06 UTC :

    WOW ! ….. I have worked with RCX (with Java (lejos)) …. but this looks terrific ! ..

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About

Guy Rouleau and Seth Popinchalk are Application Engineers for MathWorks. They write here about Simulink and other MathWorks tools used in Model-Based Design.

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