Legodroid: A Type-Driven Library for Android and LEGO Mindstorms Interoperability

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Mar 30;20(7):1926. doi: 10.3390/s20071926.

Abstract

LEGO Mindstorms robots are widely used as educational tools to acquire skills in programming complex systems involving the interaction of sensors and actuators, and they offer a flexible and modular workbench to design and evaluate user-machine interaction prototypes in the robotic area. However, there is still a lack of support to interoperability features and the need of high-level tools to program the interaction of a robot with other devices. In this paper, we introduce Legodroid, a new Java library enabling cross-programming LEGO Mindstorms robots through Android smartphones that exploits their combined computational and sensorial capabilities in a seamless way. The library provides a number of type-driven coding patterns for interacting with sensors and motors. In this way, the robustness of the software managing robot's sensors dramatically improves.

Keywords: Android; EV3; LEGO mindstorms; design patterns; type-driven development.