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

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.