Daniele Benedettelli
Grosseto, Italy
Highschool Electronics Teacher, Freelance LEGO Designer
Bio
Daniele Benedettelli is a robotics engineer, known worldwide for his LEGO® MINDSTORMS® robotics creations. His Youtube channel counts almost 6 million views, and his robots has been demonstrated in several events and conferences, shown in TV shows (including RAI, SAT.1, National Geographic) all over the world since 2007.
From 2006 to 2012 he collaborated with The LEGO Company as consultant and programmer to develop the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT and EV3 products for educational robotics.
He wrote three books to teach how to build and program robots:
• Creating Cool LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Robots (Apress, 2008) includes JohnNXT, a replica of the robot star from the 1986 movie “Short Circuit”
• LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Thinking Robots (No Starch Press, 2009) includes building instructions for a simplified version of the world-famous Rubik’s cube solver robot LEGO RUBIK UTOPIA.
• The LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Laboratory (No Starch Press, 2013) has become de facto a standard book to learn robotics using LEGO, selling more than 20000 copies and being translated in German, Korean, Polish, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.
His LEGO portfolio includes autonomous robots, control systems, AI-enabled unsupervised learning robots, industrial plants models; LEGO RUBIK UTOPIA, the first LEGO MINDSTORMS robot that could solve a 3x3 Rubik’s cube in less than a minute (2007); LEGONARDO, an half-bust automaton that can draw live portraits (2009); Cyclops, a complex robot that can walk, gesticulate, talk, act, understand speech and interact with people, furthermore remote controllable using an upper-body LEGO exoskeleton (2011); Duck Maker, a duck robot that can replicate itself, laying eggs containing ever-different chicks built with 6 LEGO bricks (2014).
Daniele works as a freelance LEGO designer, making models on commission for international education companies that hold summer camps, extra-scholastic courses and laboratories (Bricks4Kidz, BrainVyne, Create & Learn). For international companies and research institutions (Elettric80, CEA LIST, Hermes Reply, ABB Robotics) he realized detailed working scale models of automatic industrial plants: LEGO Car Factory (for CEA LIST, 2015), a desktop scale model of a car factory, used as a test bench for the Papyrus software; LEGO Car Factory (for Hermes Reply, 2016); a set of LEGO peripherals to integrate with a real robot in a robotic cell model that simulates the metal stamping process (ABB Robotics, 2016).