This robot construction kit offers endless possibilities for creative play, but it may be just a bit too complicated for adults
The Good: Seemingly endless variety in this box
The Bad: Not for the mechanically challenged. Lots of complexity, all the instructions are visual
The Bottom Line: Five templates are just the beginning for robots that can respond to their environments
Reviews:
In the end, cooler heads didn't prevail. During the warm-up for a panel discussion on robotics in San Francisco Apr. 11, Caleb Chung, the paunchy, animated toymaker behind the '90s hit Furby, was trying to agitate Lego's more staid Soren Lund into a robo-duel. Chung was armed with a prototype of his latest creation: a green, robotic, toy dinosaur called Pleo that can mimic emotions. Lund, the Dane in charge of Lego's robot-building products, resisted, instead preferring to answer attendees' questions about the technology arrayed on the table in front of the pair.
But Chung kept prodding, and Lund kept dodging, until he could presumably take no more. Then he touched a switch on a robotic Lego scorpion, which wheeled forward and began swinging a hammer-like appendage down on Pleo's head. Chung stroked the dino and spoke to it in soothing tones.
Most customers of Lego's latest robot creation kit, Mindstorms NXT, won't use their machines as battling robots. But the über-enthusiasts who inhabit the Mindstorms realm have veered off in other wild directions, using the 519-piece kit to assemble and program robots that can catapult Lego bricks, fill a dog's food bowl, and play Twister (through an add-on light sensor that can detect colors).
Aficionados Helped Design It
Those ideas originally sprang from the minds of Lego aficionados the company recruited to help it design NXT, the Danish toy company's second robot-building kit, which arrived on U.S. shelves in August, 2006. Less ambitious customers can still configure the $250 kit's motors, wheels, gears, and sensors to create bots that carry out programmed routines in response to sounds, light, and touch.
To see what the fuss was about, I chose Mindstorms NXT for the third installment of a series of reviews of robotic devices aimed at consumers (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/18/07, "Hasbro's Fickle Butterscotch," and 5/2/07, "iRobot's Unhousebroken Dirt Dog").
A lot has changed since Lego introduced the first version of Mindstorms in 1998. That product, developed with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's famed Media Lab and based on ideas from artificial-intelligence pioneer Seymour Papert, helped bring robotic programming to a mass market. Lego has sold more than 1 million of the original Mindstorms kits.
Kinder, Simpler Kit
But Lund says it took too long for kids to get their robots up and running (this is a toy, after all), and users complained about the arcane programming language. So this time Lego teamed with scientific-equipment maker National Instruments (NATI) to develop a more visual programming environment that runs on PCs and Macs. It also souped up Mindstorms' intelligence "brick"—the plastic box that houses its chips and memory, gets input from the sensors, and sends commands to the motors—to handle more complex tasks (see BusinessWeek, 9/4/06, "Brainier Robots, Brainier Kids?"). And users can attach new sensors to their models that detect changes in light, sound, and pressure. There's even an ultrasonic sensor that tells Mindstorms robots how far they are from obstacles.
Lund says Lego wanted to balance open-ended creation designed to appeal to its sophisticated, adult customers with straightforward templates, so kids 10 and older could quickly build models that worked. Lego plays up the "Quickstart" option that's supposed to let kids build a three-wheeled robot that drives around within a half hour without touching a PC. It took me an hour, but then again, I'm probably not part of Lego's mechanically inclined target market, who bought 200,000 kits in NXT's first five months on sale. by Aaron Ricadela
No comments:
Post a Comment