By 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.

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?

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.