Bryan Bonahoom is a LEGO MINDSTORMS enthusiast. He is a member of the Lafayette LEGO Robotics Club and one of the original team that developed the Great Ball Contraption. Bryan is also cofounder of Brickworld™. Bryan was selected by LEGO in 2006 as a member of the MDP and later as a member of the MINDSTORMS Community Partners (MCP). Bryan was also awarded the Best Robot Design Trophy at the 2005 AFOL Tournament at LEGO headquarters as a member of Team Hassenplug. Bryan is possibly most well known for the creation of an NXT-based robot that plays tic-tac-toe with a human opponent.
John Brost had a passion for LEGO and all things mechanical at an early age. However, the interest waned, and like most adult LEGO fans, John went through his “dark ages” in high school and while attending Purdue University. The release of the Star Wars LEGO sets brought a renewed interest in LEGO to John. But it was a chance encounter with an announcement of a LEGO Robotic Sumo competition being held locally that brought John back to LEGO 100 percent. It took only this event to get John hooked. Less than two weeks later, John had his first MIND-STORMS RIS kit, and he has been busily building robots and all sorts of mechanical LEGO contraptions ever since then.
John has participated in all types of MINDSTORMS competitions, winning a few here and there. He has also been a coach for LafLRC’s (Lafayette LEGO Robotics Club) FIRST LEGO League team for the past five years. In 2006, John was lucky enough to become a member of the LEGO MINDSTORMS Developer Program to test the MINDSTORMS NXT. Currently, John is a moderator on LEGO’s NXTlog Web site and a coordinator for the 2007 Brickworld convention being held in Chicago.
Rebeca Dunn-Krahn is a member of a working group at the University of Victoria dedicated to increasing awareness and understanding of computer science among children and young adults. She is currently producing a short documentary film about these outreach efforts that include free robotics festivals using LEGO MINDSTORMS. Rebeca has also worked in quality assurance and as a Java developer.
Rebeca holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and biochemistry from the University of Victoria and lives in Victoria, Canada, with her family. Rebeca would like to thank her husband, Tobias, and her children, Sophia and Sebastian, for their support.
Richard Li is one of two nonadult contributors to Building Robots with LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT. He is currently a seventh-grader at Beck Academy and heads two award-winning FIRST LEGO League (FFL) teams. They have been honored with the Champion’s Award on several occasions and are ranked as two of the top teams yearly. When not working with his FLL teams, he experiments with his own robots at home. He would like to thank his parents, Lin and Liang-Hong, for buying him his LEGOs and dealing with him as he stayed up late several nights to meet his deadline for this book. Richard currently resides in Simpsonville, SC.
Christopher Dale Minamyer (Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, University of Arizona, 2007) began studying mechanical engineering during the fall of 2002 and graduated from the University of Arizona in May 2007. A lifelong LEGO fan, Chris has been building with LEGO for 20 years.
For the past four years Chris was an instructor of LEGO Robotics at Ventana Vista Elementary School in Tucson, AZ. During this time he instructed more than 300 students in grades one through five in LEGO MINDSTORMS RCX and NXT. In addition Chris is a founding member of the Tucson LEGO Club Masters Group and the head coach. Chris has been a FIRST LEGO League coach for the past four years. In that time the teams he coached have won the Robot Performance award (2004) and the Research Quality award (2005) for the state of Arizona. In addition Chris received the Adult Coach/Mentor award (2005) and the Appreciation award (2006).
Chris would like to thank his mother, Martha, and father, Rodger, for always supporting his LEGO building, and giving him his first set at the age of three. In addition he would like to thank Misha Chernobelskiy of the Tucson LEGO Club for providing an ideal environment for the instruction of LEGO enthusiasts. Finally, Chris would like to thank Caryl Jones of Ventana Vista Elementary School for her support and her continuing dedication to teaching LEGO robotics.
Deepak Patil developed interest in LEGO robotics when the original LEGO MINDSTORMS kit was introduced in 1998. Since then Deepak has coached FLL teams and has conducted several robotics workshops with LEGO MINDSTORMS.
Deepak has a master’s degree in Industrial Design from IIT Bombay and has designed user interfaces for diverse products, including programmable logic controllers, telephony software, and multimedia systems. Deepak has worked for Cisco and other leading technology companies, and he has led technology projects with globally interspersed teams of engineers.
Deepak lives in Richmond, VA, with his wife, Priti, daughter, Vibha, and son, Uday, an avid LEGO Robotics fan.
Mac Ruiz is a retired construction superintendent. His work entailed problem solving and coordinating of off-site engineers and subcontractors with the projects’ realities. He also has experience in fabrication of farm equipment from his family’s dealership. This included steel fabrication and mechanicals.
Christian Siagian is working toward a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC). He is involved in the Beobot Project that develops a biologically inspired vision-based mobile-robot localization and navigation system. His research interests include robotics and computer and biological vision.
As a teaching assistant for CS445 Introduction to Robotics at USC, Christian develops laboratory curriculum to prepare undergraduates for research in robotics. Christian also volunteers for after-school programs at St. Agnes Parish School and EPICC in Los Angeles. These programs use robotics to promote interest in science and mathematics in elementary and middle school students.
Christian holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in Computer Science and is a member of the IEEE.
Dick Swan is an embedded software consultant. He partnered with the Robotics Academy at Carnegie Mellon University in developing the RobotC programming environment for the NXT. He also codeveloped with Tufts University the Robolab programming environment for the NXT. Dick has 30 years’ experience in software and hardware projects, including embedded systems, telephone systems, and compilers. Dick has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and is a member of the IEEE.
Sivan Toledo is Associate Professor of Computer Science in Tel-Aviv University in Israel. He holds a BSc degree in Math and Computer Science and an MSc degree in Computer Science, both from Tel-Aviv University, and a PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He authored more than 50 scientific papers and one textbook. He serves on the editorial boards of the SIAM Journal of Scientific Computing and of Parallel Computing.
Joshua Whitman is a home-schooled eighth-grader from Wichita, KS. He has been building with LEGO bricks for as long as he can remember. He received his first MINDSTORMS RCX kit at age eight. He has participated in numerous robotics groups, clubs, and classes. He competed on a team in WSU’s MINDSTORMS Robotics Challenge for two years. His team won the first-place trophy both times. As an experienced member of the team, he had to learn how to help teach the newer kids about MIND-STORMS. He was a part of the first winning team to use an NXT to compete in the challenge.
His favorite (and most impressive) creation is a robot that can actually lock and unlock his room through a rotation sensor combination lock. The system is surprisingly secure, and 99.9 percent foolproof. He loves programming more than anything else in robotics. His current project involves using the NXT display as a screen for simple videogames like Pong.
Larry Whitman (Ph.D., RE.) is an Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Wichita State University. Larry promotes engineering in every context possible. He is especially interested in promoting the technical literacy of all citizens, not just those who intend to be engineers. To this end, he and several colleagues at Wichita State have developed a course using LEGO MINDSTORMS in a hands-on environment to demonstrate basic engineering skills to nonengineering undergraduates. He also coordinates a LEGO MINDSTORMS challenge competition for middle school students. Finally, he promotes engineering by training his two sons, Joshua and David, to love building LEGO robots.
Larry holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oklahoma State University. After spending 10 years in the aerospace industry as a practicing engineer, he completed his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Arlington.
Larry, Joshua, and David are forever indebted to Larry’s wife, Heidi, for putting up with pieces of robots around the house and dinner conversations about robots and engineering.
Guy Ziv is now finishing his graduate studies in biological physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He holds a bachelor’s degree in math and physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a master’s degree in physics from the Weizmann Institute. Guy has been working in the field of measurement and automation for several years. He is an experienced Lab View™ programmer and was a beta tester of NI Lab View™ toolkit for NXT and MINDSTORMS NXT v. 1.1. Guy is the author and editor of NXTasy.org, the second largest NXT community site, and he moderates NXTasy.org’s repository and forums.