Getting Started
Welcome to the first installment of the Grand RobotShop Tutorial, a series of 10 lessons that will teach you how to make your own robot. This tutorial is aimed at anybody willing to get started in robotics and have a basic understanding of terms such as “voltage”, “current”, “motor”, and “sensors”. Although this might seem pretty basic, even people with previous robot building experience might find useful information regarding the general method of building a robot.
What is a robot?
There are many definitions of robot and no real consensus has been attained so far. We loosely define a robot as follows:
Robot: An electromechanical device which is capable of reacting in some way to its environment, and take autonomous decisions or actions in order to achieve a specific task.
This means that a toaster, a lamp, or a car would not be considered as robots since they have no way of perceiving their environment. On the other hand, a vacuum cleaner that can navigate around a room, or a solar panel that seeks the sun, can be considered as a robotic system.
It is also important to note that the “robots” featured in Robot Wars for instance or any solely remote controlled device would not fall under this definition and would be closer to a more complex remote controlled car.
Although this definition is quite general, it might need to evolve in the future in order to keep up with the latest advancement in the field. In order to get a sens of how robotics is rapidly growing, we suggest you take a look at the RobotShop History of Robotics.
Let’s get started
This series of tutorials is intended to guide you through the steps of building a complete mobile robot.
There are 10 lessons that will be released in the following 10 weeks. Each lesson guides you through one step of making a general-purpose mobile robot. This will enable you to build your very own mobile robot in order to perform a task of your choice. Each lesson will be...