Robot Building

The book I read to research this post was Robot Building For Dummies by Nancy Stevenson, which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Just like computers have gone from being something strictly for hobbyists in the 70's to the mainstream nowadays, robots are set to do the same in the near future. At the moment robots tend to be a bit limited in what they can do, but especially for the more common serious hobby ones you often download controlling programs from the web and transfer them to the robot. Part of the A+ exam is that you have to control a simple robotic arm or similar from a computer. An important point they make is that you must read the instructions even if construction seems simple as there can easily be something important you miss out and it won't work. Often you need to things like wires and it's important the solder melts properly to make a proper connection. They look at constructing a robot called Soccer Jr. which is a basic one and one called Arobot which is a more expensive and complex one. They also look at adding things like temperature and motion sensors. A couple of good robot products website is http://robotstore.com & http://jameco.com. It's interesting to note the military are heavily into developing robot technology and drones and other robots have actively been used for surveillance in Afghanistan. Many people like to build a robot and a perspex semi circular cover on it which looks good but hinders access if it breaks down. Of course having robot wars where robots smash each other up in a duel is big business and there are even tv programmes devoted to this. I did read in another book that it will be possible to buy a computer that will be able to match the processing power of the human brain by 2030 which is very exciting and gives you an idea of what can be achieved with robots. In all probability we will have robot assistants to do things like housework by then. I did really enjoy this book and there are shopping chains like Radio Shack & Maplins that carry extensive lines of robot project parts. At least to start off with you are probably best off assembling a kit rather than designing and building one from scratch.