Robotics is becoming an increasingly popular field for hobbyists and professionals alike. The cost of the mechanics and electronics required to build a robot are low enough that almost anybody can afford it. The hardware that used to require government funding or a large university is now available to the average person. At the same time, programming is becoming a more common skill. This book combines the most sophisticated parts of robotics and programming to fill a real gap in available information. Most robotics books today use microcontrollers as the “brains” of the robots. This approach is fine for smaller, less expensive projects, but has serious limitations. When attempting to build a robot with sophisticated movements, navigation abilities, vision, and picture-capturing abilities, it is better to use a single board computer (SBC) such as Linux as the controller.
Author: D. Jay Newman
Publisher: McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics
Customer Reviews
-
How a robot should be built.
I have this book and it has more than enough information to build a very capable robot that makes most of those that you can buy a toy.
<br />Using free (as in free beer) software from the internet you can make a robot that can be anything that you want with just a little thought. The information is supplied in sections starting from some basic knowedge you can create a robot a piece at a time. The information covers movement - internal networking between indivual control modules to internet networking of the robot, to having the robot figure out where in the world or house it is and how does it get to where it needs to be. All the source code for the software is in the book and available from the authors site. It is a great starting place for a very potent robot.
-
Lots of Robotics, Not so much on Linux
Building Robots has become a fascination to a lot of people, including Mr. Newman, the author of this book. His robots are a long ways from C3PO. He basically build a robot mounted on wheels that has an awful lot of electronics. But then again he is including a lot of features in his design.
<br />
<br />There are lot of ways to implement the controller. In this case he uses a small size but standard PC motherboard. On this board he runs a Linux operating system. In spite of the title, this is not really a book on how to use Linux to control robots. He just happens to use Linux for his robot because it is cheaper than Windows.
<br />
<br />Most of the programming information he gives is the form of Java progrms that will handle the various devices (such as vision) that he wants built into his robots. In fact, much of the book, too much in fact, is given over to code. The code is available on line, reprinting it here in the book is pretty boring reading.
<br />
<br />The book is a good introduction on how to design and build a robot using standard components. Here's how you can get started.
|
