Wicked Cool Java

Robot School: Neural Net Robotics

In an earlier section, "Think outside the Blocks: Using Java to Control a Lego Robot," we used a Java API (LEJOS) to control a Lego Mindstorms robot. If you are building a robot to perform complex tasks based on some combination of sensor inputs, you might want to use a neural network in your robot design. We saw the Joone API in Chapter 5, and with some modifications this could be applied to a LEJOS-based program running on an RCX controller. As an example, suppose that your robot must look for some pattern of light fluctuations before it can move. If you take this approach, the most important step is in training ...