![](bg1.png)
LegOSC
Mindstorms NXT Robotics Programming for Artists
Jorge Cardoso
Research Centre for Science and Technology in Art (CITAR), Portuguese Catholic University
Rua Diogo Botelho 1327, 4169-005 Porto, Portugal
Manuel Ferreira, Cristina Santos
Department of Industrial Electronics, University of Minho, Campus de Azurem – Guimar˜aes, Portugal
Keywords:
Robots, Art, Lego Mindstorms, OSC.
Abstract:
Robotics is an interesting but difficult area for digital artists who generally don’t have much academic back-
ground on electronics or computer programming. Digital art students normally use high-level application to
program their visual and sonorous installations. This paper presents LegOSC - a tool that allows the control of
the Mindstorms NXT robots from any application that uses the Open Sound Control protocol which is imple-
mented by most of those high-level applications. This allows artists to create works which incorporate robotic
parts using the familiar programming environment.
1 INTRODUCTION
Robotics are becoming increasingly interesting for
artists in many areas, e.g., painting (Moura and
Pereira, 2004), theater (Ullanta, 2007), sculp-
ture (Pisaturo, 2007), installation (da Costa, 2007),
music (f18institute, 2007). More and more, art work
incorporates some electro-mechanic parts which pro-
vide more ways for the artist to express himself, or to
complement his ability to do so.
However, using robotic systems still requires
some expertise that most artists don’t possess. Even
in digital art degrees, robotics is usually not a subject.
Art students generally lack the necessary background
in electronics.
Altough there are now some simple tools to build
and program robotic systems (of which, perhaps, the
most widely known is the Lego Mindstorms (Lego
Group, 2007)) and many uses in classrooms (Fa-
gin, 2003; Klassner and Anderson, 2003; Bruder and
Wedeward, 2003; Ceccarelli, 2003), these can still be
difficult to integrate in an art work.
As an example, students in the author’s school
usually use platforms like Processing (Fry and
Reas, 2007), Eyesweb (Camurri et al., 2000),
Adobe Flash (Adobe, 2007b), Adobe Direc-
tor (Adobe, 2007a), Max/MSP (Cycling74, 2007),
Pure Data (Puckette, 1996), to implement their visual
and sonorous installations. These platforms can (and
usually are) be interconnected using MIDI mes-
sages http://www.midi.org, or Open Sound Control
(OSC) (Wright and Freed, 1997) messages.
In order to provide an easier setting for the use of
a robotic system that can be controlled by a platform
like the ones listed above, LegOSC has been imple-
mented – an Open Sound Control gateway application
to control the Lego Mindstorms NXT robotic system.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: sec-
tion 2 introduces the Lego Mindstorms NXT system;
section 3 describes the Open Sound Control protocol;
section 4 presents the arquitecture and usage of the
LegOSC application; section 5 describes some usages
of LegOSC; section 6 describes some of the limita-
tions of LegOSC; finnaly, section 7 concludes.
2 MINDSTORMS NXT
The Lego Mindstorms NXT system consists of three
main component types: the NXT brick; motors and
sensors and assorted Lego bricks.
The NXT brick has a 32-bit ARM7 microcon-
troller, 256 Kbytes FLASH, 64 Kbytes RAM. It has
Bluetooth wireless communication (Bluetooth Class
II V2.0 compliant) a USB full speed port (12 Mbit/s),
177
Cardoso J., Ferreira M. and Santos C. (2008).
LegOSC - Mindstorms NXT Robotics Programming for Artists.
In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - RA, pages 177-182
DOI: 10.5220/0001485201770182
Copyright
c
SciTePress