The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 Inventor's Guide, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14. The Jeep: A Front-Wheel Drive Vehicle

While in the past few chapters we focused on using treads for mobility, this chapter presents the Jeep, a four-wheeled vehicle (Figure 14-1). The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 set includes four medium-sized wheels—and a matching set of tires, of course—which makes it incredibly fast, easy, and fun to build vehicles with wheels. But there are many possible ways to use wheels, as you’ll see in the Jeep’s front-wheel drive configuration.

You’ll begin by taking a brief look at how this front-wheel drive configuration works, and then we’ll build the Jeep. Next, you’ll program the Jeep to drive around a room while avoiding objects, and then you’ll create another program that enables it to follow a line using ...