Pick-and-place Lego prototyping

posted Sep 30th 2009 7:00am by Mike Szczys
filed under: robots hacks

[Ned] tipped us off about his project for a class at Carnegie Mellon. Utilizing a Denso 6-AOF robotic arm they have built a rapid prototyping machine that uses Lego as the building material. LDraw, the open standard Lego CAD program, is used to build a model which is then translated into MATLAB files that the robotic arm can use for placement commands. Right now pieces need to be placed on a template for the robot to find and pick up.

It’s great that Lego pieces are used because they are readily available and inexpensive, but this type of precision robot makes the project unattainable for most tinkerers. Still, the concept is interesting and we could see an end goal being a more widely available machine. It’s not too much of a leap to image a RepRap type machine that takes internal measurements of a circuit board and the components, calculates inside case dimensions, then builds a prototype enclosure from common Lego pieces.

Comments [11]

tagged: arm, cnc, lego, rapid prototyping, robot

11 Responses to Pick-and-place Lego prototyping

bbot says:

September 30, 2009 at 7:19 am

College students love kludging things together in matlab.

The machine vision bit is pretty neat, but if this is sped up by eight times, then it must be pretty damn slow in real time.

Also would have liked to see a HTML writeup.

(whine whine whine)

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Foone says:

September 30, 2009 at 7:42 am

By the way, they’re using the (excellent) MLCad, not LDraw. MLCad uses the LDraw datafiles (like most Lego design tools), but it’s not based on it.

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Hackius says:

September 30, 2009 at 7:59 am

@bbot: Matlab is awesome for rapid prototyping anything that needs copious amounts of math.

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monkeyslayer56 says:

September 30, 2009 at 8:35 am

looks cool. i should build one and give those legos in my closet a use lol

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jonzilla9000 says:

September 30, 2009 at 11:03 am

This would be far cooler if the rapid prototyping machine was made out of legos too.

It’s definitely possible – the attached clip is an automated lego factory that makes lego cars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ3AcPEPbH0

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partnerincrime says:

September 30, 2009 at 11:09 am

it’s probably so slow because of the precision required to place the pieces in between each other e.g. seconds: 24-26. lego bricks next to each other have a spacing of .2mm or something like that, so you need to be pretty darn accurate!

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monkeyslayer56 says:

September 30, 2009 at 11:13 am

@partnerincrime
i second that as i was playing with the schools robot arm one time and had the bigger legos with larger spaceing(the little kid version…) i had a VERY hard time getting it to line up and not just crush them and trigger a crash on the program.

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David says:

September 30, 2009 at 9:37 pm

Really!? For Legos, the same thing’s that can easily be put together quickly enough by hand. What a waste. I’m all for automated assembly tech, but this one is ridiculous.

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led tester says:

September 30, 2009 at 9:46 pm

Great! Just what I need to help me add to my Imperial capital fleet!

http://starwars.yahoo.com/photos/lego-star-wars-imperial-battle-cruiser

http://www.amazon.com/Lego-Star-Wars-Imperial-Destroyer/dp/B001NH586A

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Ned says:

October 1, 2009 at 9:24 am

@David

I agree it’s completely pointless. It’s just a fun and (I thought) interesting way to combine technologies to accomplish something. When it changes from pointless to slightly useful is when it does what we originally wanted it to do, which is decompose a solid model (Solidworks, ProE, Inventor, etc) and build a model out of that. Even more, something like this could find its way to a Children’s/Science Museum to teach kids the basics of CAD and more advanced development processes in a language they can understand — Legos.