17/12/2010
Now it has just been made easier to make your very own Android apps for LEGO MINDSTORMS!
Thursday 16 December it was announced that the App Inventor for Android has integrated a palette of control functions for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT that allows you to build your own app for your Android devices that can control your LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot with its motors and sensors.
At the Google headquarters in Mountainview, California, a big group of dedicated Google employees formed the 20% Robotics Task Force and spent countless hours assembling and disassembling LEGO MINDSTORMS bots to try and get the coolest designs for line following, shooting balls, and using the sensors in fun ways to demo our Android apps.
Says Ryan Hickman, Eng Project Manager and Über-Dogfooder at Google: ‘We recently showed the Cellbots app to a group of children visiting on a school trip and they had a ton of fun driving the LEGO robots around the room using the Android phone for a remote control!’.
Read more about it at the Google Code Blog.
If you want to learn more about the research behind the project then check out the Google Research Blog.
If you want to know more about how you can now make your own apps with App Inventor, check this the App Inventor Android website.
And finally you can learn more about Cellbot and their involvement in the project here.
Play well,
The LEGO MINDSTORMS Team