Machine Learning with Lego Mindstorms

In my machine learning course, our professor wants us to kind of lead our own projects this semester in contrast to having given very specific assigned projects in the past. It is our task to come up with a cool machine learning problem and then go out and actually solve it.

So, over the past few days I have had a lot of things run through my mind...a lot of different ideas. One of the ideas is Lego Mindstorms. I think it would be really cool to construct a Lego Mindstorms robot and do some machine learning with it, but for the life of me I can't think of a good problem to solve using a Lego Mindstorms robot.

So I was looking for ideas, and I thought maybe you guys could help me out. What kind of cool machine learning problems could you solve with a Mindstorms robot? I'm not talking about the classic "follow a dark line" or "get all the cans out of the circle". Those can easily be done without any "learning" at all.

I need a problem that requires the task of actually gathering lots of data, and then performing operations of classification, clustering, etc. Something that use perceptrons, decision trees, support vector machines, etc. etc. etc.

Any ideas?

Make a robot that scratches a human's back, and then focuses on one specific spot and scratches harder when you gasp or moan... I'll buy it from you after finals...

Oh hell yeah! Mass produce those o.o

Build a robot that can find lost gloves.

I lose mine every Christmas... :( I shall have no pie.

Just in case you think I'm kidding, I wasn't. I mean it involves sound recognition, forming patterns, staying between a persons neck and belt, not going near ickly-tickly spots I have under my arms... That thing would be an engineering marvel! Plus it's funny.. You could seriously market that thing.

Your right it would be :) Haha so far it's the only one on the list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Little_Kittens

Hmmm, lego mindstroms are pretty milited in capability. I would suggest a more developed AI platform. I mean an ITX board with a webcam gives you so much more to work with than the brick.

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Originally Posted by abachler

Hmmm, lego mindstroms are pretty milited in capability. I would suggest a more developed AI platform. I mean an ITX board with a webcam gives you so much more to work with than the brick.

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According to my old robotics teacher(who gardens for a living lmao) they show more potential than a computer for programming. Strange.

Make a robot that can play the 3D chess game from star trek :D


With real pieces that it has to detect and move

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Originally Posted by sean

I mean it involves sound recognition, forming patterns, staying between a persons neck and belt, not going near ickly-tickly spots.... You could seriously market that thing.

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I can imagine the marketing spin:

"Engineered to stay between your neck and belt, but if it doesn't, satisfaction guaranteed!" ;)

make a robot that recognizes peoples feeling by observing their facial expressions!

Robotic cat petter. Will have to learn the many contridictory signals cats give and be able to defend itself

Build (various?) awkward shaped robots and make them learn how to move using reinforcement learning. Something like this. You give it some joints, you have some sort of roller that gives positive reward when it's rolled forward, and you use pretty much standard RL.

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Originally Posted by lruc

According to my old robotics teacher(who gardens for a living lmao) they show more potential than a computer for programming. Strange.

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Well he would be 'wrong'. Robotics isnt the cutting edge science it was 20 years ago. It's a mature technology, the same as computers, more so in fact, since most of the new developments in robotics involve developments in computing power. Its still advancing of course, but there arent any unsolved theoretical problems left that arent specific to another discipline. As for programmability, The ITX boards support 2-4GB of ram and a quad core processor along with expansion cards like a GPU, I'm pretty sure the brick doesnt come close, its not even in the same ball park, hell its not even the same sport.

The brick is a toy, or at best a siple prototype for teaching. You won't see the brick on a Mars rover or building cars in a factory, or piloting a UAV or in a Terminator.

I still reckon you should go for the lego groan induced w... machine. Its the future!