Levandowski
constructed BillSortBot from just 300 Lego pieces out of the
717 available. Peg
Skorpinski photo
(Click for larger image.) |
Like many children, Anthony Levandowski had a passion for playing with Legos.
Now itís finally paid off for the third year Industrial Engineering
and Operations Research student. In May, Levandowski led his classmates
to gold at the inaugural Java Technology Lego MindStorms Challenge.
The Berkeley contingent's winning amalgamation of plastic blocks
and silicon is BillSortBot, a robot whose sole purpose in life is
to sort Monopoly money.
The aim of the game, sponsored by Sun Microsystems and open
to Bay Area universities, was to build an "innovative, cool robot"
using only a single Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System
kit and program it in Sun's popular Java computer language. The
commercially-available Lego kit consists of traditional Lego bricks
and gears along with a pair of motors, a touch sensor, a light
sensor, batteries, and a small microprocessor. Charm was also
a factor the Sun engineer judges took into consideration, hence
BillSortBot's Muppet-like mug.
"Adding the purple antennas and large eyes gave her a little bit of character," says Levandowski, who along with his teammates were enrolled in an introductory robot design and programming course taught by IEOR professor emeritus Roger Glassey.
Competition from the two other colleges who accepted the challenge
was fierce. UC Santa Cruz's SlugBot plunked out melodies on an
electronic piano keyboard while Stanford University's MazeBot
scanned paper mazes and traced out solutions. But the BillSortBot
played tough, earning its creators the grand prizes of leather
jackets emblazoned with the Java logo and "Java-enabled" golf
putters tricked-out with a microprocessor that analyzes your swing
and enables you to compete in online putting tournaments.
When loaded with a pile of Monopoly funny money, BillSortBot peels bills one at a time from the stack and uses its light sensor to determine the color of the money by measuring the intensity of the light reflected off the paper. If the bill is the color the user has instructed the robot to sort out, it's spit into one bin. All other colors drop into another bin.
Levandowski's BillSortBot. |
"We didn't want to create a problem and then make a robot that would just
solve that problem," Levandowski says. "Most robots out there
are just for entertainment, but we wanted to solve a problem that
almost everyone has."
While Levandowski admits that piles of mixed up Monopoly money may not be a pressing concern for most, it does vividly illustrate an ongoing challenge in industrial engineering - sorting parts on assembly lines. Advances in industrial production methods can speed up manufacturing processes and reduce the end cost of the products being assembled.
Indeed, the toughest mechanical problem the team faced was getting
the robot to reliably maneuver the small paper rectangles. BillSortBot
does this with only two motors. One motor feeds the bills under
the light sensor, the other distributes the bill by spinning clockwise
or counterclockwise depending on the bin it's dealing into.
"Many engineers have spent a career working on this problem,
and anyone who has experienced paper jams in a printer or copier
can appreciate its difficulty," says Glassey, the team's faculty
adviser.
Levandowski plans to enter BillSortBot in future MindStorms competitions and hopes other Lego robot enthusiasts will further the research his team instigated. In the meantime, BillSortBot loyally cranks out cash whenever Levandowski grabs the game board.
"I was just in Italy and the family I stayed with played Monopoly," he says. "I showed BillSortBot to them and they were very impressed that this was the kind of research I get to conduct in college."
BillSortBot Home Page: 63.202.208.141/bsb/
Sun Microsystems news about the Challenge: www.sun.com/developers/evangcentral/challenge/
