Interacting Machines made with Power Functions elements.
Pictures of PF elements are now approved for release by
TLG because the Bulldozer 8275 has appeared at toy fairs
world-wide.

These two machines communicate with each other over the
Infra-Red link.
They operate in the order Red -> Yellow -> Green -> Blue,
each motor turning the gears and moving the lever to
change the direction for the next motor, and so on.  The
blue motor to lever relationship is reversed, so that
all four levers move inwards in sequence (blue first)
then all four levers move outwards in sequence.

This technique can be used to make robots hunt in packs or
control each other in lots of weird and wonderful ways!

Driving other functions via the motor gear mechnisms
allows machines to do various things before telling the
next motor to move.  The drives to the levers are limited
by white 2.5Ncm torque limit gears.  The motors are quite
happy to drive the gears indefinitely with the 9:1
reduction used here.

An improvement would be to let the levers return to the
centre by slipping in a mechnism, so that this scheme
didn't have to have all but one motor turning at the same
time (the stopping and reversing motor changing in
sequence).  This would improve battery and torque gear
life.

Mark Bellis
March 2007