Название: Intermediate Robot Building, Second Edition
Автор: David Cook
Издательство: Apress
Серия: Technology in Action
ISBN: 1430227540
Год: 2010
Страниц: 470
Язык: английский
Формат: True PDF
Размер: 45.9 MB

This book was much more difficult to write than the first book, Robot Building for Beginners, Second Edition (Apress, 2010). In the first book, I assume the reader knows nothing about electronics or machining. That neatly limits the book’s subjects to the trunk of the “robot tree of knowledge.”

But a funny thing happens after that. Robots are so diverse in their capabilities and purposes that the robot tree of knowledge explodes with braches in all sorts of directions after you understand the basics.

Therefore, it’s impossible to select a single type of robot that all intermediate builders want to make. Upon being armed with (almost) enough knowledge, each builder is already heading down his or her own unique path. Therefore, this book is about how to grow a robot, not what type of robot to grow.

Rather than building a robot, build modules. Build power supply modules, motor driver modules, sensor modules, sound modules, and brain modules. After that, don’t build a robot—assemble a robot!

You achieve many benefits by assembling a robot from modules:
- You can handcraft the modules you’re interested in, but purchase off-the-shelf modules for the ones you aren’t interested in (or for those modules that require professional quality for a certain critical aspect of the robot).
- You can upgrade the robot by simply swapping out a module rather than replacing the entire robot.
- You can replicate and reuse successful modules on other robots.
- You can reduce the time from idea to outcome.
- You can get a functional base going (gaining that feeling of accomplishment) and build it up from there. Many times the most ambitious projects lie in partially completed piles because they’re just too complicated to finish in one or two (or twenty) sittings.