Welcome to the new UNM LEGO Robotics Pages!
In 1996 Dr. Greg Starr began the first ever LEGO Robotics class at the University of New Mexico's College of Engineering. M.E. 487 is a robotics course that has the students spend a semester building sophisticated mobile robots that will compete against each other at the end of the semester. These robots have put out fires, run relays, navigated mazes, transported M&M's, and many other things.
Here's a LEGO robot cruising around. These robots are built from standard LEGO parts and are completely autonomous being controlled by a single-board computer based on the Motorola 6811 called the HandyBoard. This course is based on the famous MIT 6.270 course and we are extremely grateful to Fred Martin and others for their pioneering work at MIT.
Every spring on the last day of class, a competition is held between all of the teams. The student's last five months of work culminate in a head-to-head competition between all of the robots. The objective of the competition changes each year with different requirements being placed on the teams. The competitions are always quite the spectator sport. Local TV and news media come out to see the fun and the post-race party is always memorable!