A robotics Journey: Introduction and Context
When I was a kid I used to disassemble toys to understand their intrinsic nature (to the very dismay of grandma who usually bought them for me :D). But this destructive endeavour, just gave me a greater joy than simply playing with them as intended, I cannot begin to describe the excitement I had exploring the mechanisms, fiddling with them, trying to figure them out, to finally understand how they worked, that was simply magic! I have always had this curious and weird side of me. That pushed me to wonder how things worked, how small pieces fitted together to create bigger functionality.
When I learned about robots (thank you Voltron!) I was simply fascinated by this new concept, obsessed with it, it was all dreamed about, talked about. I even put together toys (in a very weird and funny humanoid form) and pretended it to be my ingenious robotic friend. Naturally with time, this evolved to a great love for science that pushed me to pursue an engineering career in Telecommunications.
But I never made my robot! Sadly I didn’t take Robotics. Now maybe calling it a mistake is not really fair, since I don’t regret that choice, I even enjoyed it! But I still feel I betrayed that little dreamy and innocent kid, who aspired to build one day his own robotic friend. That is why I decided, after all these years, to make amends, and start learning Robotics.
This is the very beginning of what I expect (and really hope) be a very long journey of learning and discovery. And unlike all my previous learning journeys I decided to document it. This way I am making a strong written commitment to reach my goal, and in the same time I will be practicing my poor english writing skills (as I intend to make writing my old age hobby :p).
In order to achieve this, I drafted a very simple plan:
- Take an AI course.
- Take a Robotics course.
- Practice, and explore more about the subject by building the robot.
In this series, I will mostly write about the last step, occasionally expending to the first two when the need of deeper explanations arise.
The Robot:
Now my plan for the robot is to be simple enough to not discourage me quickly with immense complexity, but in the same time should cover most the topics I’m interested in learning. So I decided, I shall build a Robot, that can explore an unknown environment, and behave like a cat (Yeah I love cats :D ) in a sense, that it should detect small moving objects, and get interested in them while in motion, and lose interest when they stop. The interest here will be simply translated into a follow directive, and nothing more. So the robot will follow, small moving objects, and they quit and go back to environment exploration once they stop. Very simple huh? :D.
So this brings this first introductory article to conclusion, In the next one I will try to present my initial architecture envisioning, and describe the main components I intend to use.
So see you in the next article! :)