Serious LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Soccer

Ready for a completely new LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Soccer experience?
Mario Ferrari and Daniele Benedettelli joined their efforts to create a completely automatic Soccer Game System. Forget RoboCup Junior robots that wander randomly on the field, without any clue of their position! The game field itself is a hybrid wood/aluminum/LEGO robot, that counts the scores and throws the ball back into the arena.



Check out more at robotics.benedettelli.com and stay tuned for updates!

Finding a ball

For my actual project, a soccer-playing NXT robot, I've started with a prototype that is capable of finding a ball that broadcasts infrared signals; on that behalf it uses the IR Seeker Sensor by HiTechnic :



The programmed with leJOS NXJ, the Java platform for LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT; working with it again revealed to me how powerful and elegant, yet easy to use leJOS has become by now.

SteinCHenwelt 2009: the Movie

Last weekend, the SteinCHenwelt 2009 LEGO® event took place in the Swiss Technorama Science Center at Wintherthur, Switzerland.
Here's the movie I made about it; though I could be present on Saturday only, it was worth the journey to Switzerland.
Also the NXT 2.0 soccer robots performed quite well at their first mission.