GeoDeo

I’ve recently purchased a Lego Mindstorms NXT. Of course for my sons, but as they are a bit too young for it now, I will have to use it.

It’s also for my work actually. The Lego Mindstorms is an affordable tool for different subjects we are researching, such as:

• OGC Sensor Enabled Web
• Location based services
• Command & control
• Automonous behaviour

OGC Sensor Enabled Web
The OGC Sensor Web Enablement is quite obvious: The Lego Mindstorms supports different sensors. Standard e.g. a light sensor, measuring light intenstities, and a sound sensor measuring Db and Dba. You can also buy additional sensors like temperature, RFID and gyrometer sensors. The sensors can be used for the different components of the OGC SWE. The first components which will probably be used are:

• Observation and measurement (O&M) to encode the sensor data
• Sensor Model Language (SensorML) to describe the sensor systems
• Sensor Observation Service to request, filter and retrieve sensor data.

Later the planning and alert services could be added.

Location based services
Also location based services are quite obvious. The built robot has a location and thus could respond to it (e.g navigate, react on POI’s, etc), or other applications could react to the location of the robot. Of course we first want to show the location of the robot on the Touchtable.

Control & command
On above mentioned touchtable the user could give commands to the robot. Eg to move to another location, to send measurements etc. The robot could act as a mobile field user who receives commands from a control center. Because a PC, like a UMPC can be attached to it, it could mimic the behaviour of field user ,like measurements teams during a disaster, in a training situation.

Autonomous behaviour
Contrary to the C&C mentioned above, you can give the robot an order (e.g. to move somewhere and drop something). Also the robot has the abilities to respond to situations itself. These kind of autonomous behaviour is for example examined in disaster management but normally requires an expensive system.

Conclusions
The Lego Mindstorms is an very affordable tool to investigate different geo related subjects in a extremly easy (and cool) way. It has the potential due to its combination of sensors and intelligence to investigate even further and implement trully geo-innovative ideas for only minimal costs.