Self-driving Lego Mindstorms Robot

In this paper, I describe the workings of my personal hobby project a self-driving lego mindstorms robot. The body of the robot is built with Lego Mindstorms. An Android smartphone is used to capture the view in front of the robot. A user first teaches the robot how to drive; this is done by making the robot go around a track a small number of times. The image data, along with the user action is used to train a Neural Network. At run-time, images of what is in front of the robot are fed into the neural network and the appropriate driving action is selected. This project showcases the power of python’s libraries, as they enabled me to put together a sophisticated working system in a very short amount of time. Specifically, I made use of the Python Image Library to downsample images, as well as the PyBrain neural network library. The robot was controlled using the nxt-python library.