Inside Robot Builder’s Bonanza
Robot Builder’s Bonanza, Third Edition takes an educational but fun approach to designing working robots. Its modular projects will provide the knowledge to take you from building basic motorized platforms to giving the machine a brain—and teaching it to walk, move about, sense what is going on around it, and obey commands.
If you are interested in mechanics, electronics, or robotics, you’ll find this book a treasure chest of information and ideas on making thinking machines. The projects in Robot Builder’s Bonanza include all the necessary information on how to construct the essential building blocks of a number of different personal robots. Suggested alternative approaches, parts lists, and sources of electronic and mechanical components are also provided where appropriate.
There are quite a few excellent books that have been written on how to design and build robots. But most have been aimed at making just one or two fairly sophisticated automatons, and at a fairly high price. Because of the complexity of the robots detailed in these other books, they require a fairly high level of expertise and pocket money on your part.
Robot Builder’s Bonanza is different. Its modular “cookbook” approach offers a mountain of practical, easy to follow, and inexpensive robot experiments and projects. Integrated together, the various projects presented in the book, along with ones you come up with on your own, can be combined to create several different types of highly intelligent and workable robots of all shapes and sizes—rolling robots, walking robots, talking robots, you name it.
What You Will Learn
In the more than three dozen chapters in this book you will learn about a sweeping variety of technologies, all aimed at helping you learn robot design, construction, and application. You’ll learn about:
• Robot-building fundamentals. How a robot is put together using commonly available parts such as plastic, wood, and aluminum.
• Locomotion engineering. How motors, gears, wheels, and legs are used to propel your robot over the ground.
• Constructing robotic arms and hands. How to use mechanical linkages to grasp and pick up objects.
• Sensor design. How sensors are used to detect objects, measure distance, and navigate open space.
• Adding sound capabilities. Giving your robot creation the power of voice and sound effects so that it can talk to you, and you can talk back.
• Remote control. How to operate and train your robot using wired and wireless remote control.
• Computer control. How to use and program a computer or microcontroller for operating a robot.
Most important, you will gain new insights into problem solving and looking at devices, parts, and materials from a different perspective. No longer will you look at an old CD-player or toy as just junk, but as the potential starting point or parts source for your own creations.
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