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8.0

Author: Gareth Branwyn Excerpt: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots is inviting and action-packed, with engaging ideas and fascinating factoids about robots and robot-related arts and sciences. You'll be led gently into the intimidating world of robotics, but will gain a respectable knowledge of robot history, the major fields and "schools" of robotics today and the basic skills and resources needed to create your own hobby robots. .: Buy at Amazon.com :. .: Buy at Amazon.co.uk :.

Picking up Gareth Branwyn's book, Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots, I felt that this would definitely be a good to rival Gordon McComb's excellent Robot Builder's Bonanza. Unfortunately, as I progressed through the book it became evident that the book lacked in a key area McComb covered well.

The first half of the book is superb - well-written, friendly yet informative, and with excellent background information on robots (a good historical summary), famous or influential scientists (Minsky, Brooks etc.), physics laws (Ohm's Law), computer science principles (Amdahl's Law), and details about robot taxonomy. In fact, just about everything you could wish to know before embarking on a robotics project is available in parts I and II of the book, whether you've had any experience with robotics or not.

Part II continues with a good summary of required and recommended tools, with an overview of digital multimeters and how to create the ideal robot-building desk-top and more. My favourite section though, is the DIY Ventilation System. Branwyn goes through very detailed steps to build a simple but effective ventilation system to take away toxic solder fumes, using readily available and cheap components. If there is one thing I'll take away from this book, it'll be that (and my now cleaner lungs!).

The book continues with a look at current robot kits and pre-assembled robots, such as LEGO Mindstorms, the Sony AIBO and Parallax's BOE-Bot.

The book then continues with its three featured projects: a coat hanger walker (BEAM-like robot), a MouseBot (autonomous computer mouse) and a DiscBot (OOPic-powered AOL CDs). While all the projects have a definite wow-factor, they are all fairly complex. The coat hanger walker is based upon the bicore, which require free-form soldering, a rather daunting and finicky procedure. Furthermore, the components are not all that easy to come by, and will definitely require some hunting (although the book does come with a 10% reduction from Solarbotics). I really think the choice of the coat hanger walker as a 'first robot' was a very bad idea.

The second project is a little better - while the project is well-explained and diagrammed, it is still aiming a little too high for beginners. The robot consists of a gutted computer mouse and some IR 'eyes', a bumper switch and a couple of DC motors. The mouse will (hopefully) turn into a light-seeking robot. The final project is probably the easiest to build and acquire the components for (although the most expensive). The DiscBot simply uses old CDs to create a base in which to mount some motors and an OOPic controller.

The final part acts as a resource reference, listing robot stores (US only, as usual), good magazines, videos and websites.

This book is an excellent addition to a beginner's collection of robotics books since the first half of the book is well-written and very comprehensive. Unfortunately, due to the latter half it does not justify itself as a standalone book - the projects are just too complex for an absolute beginner.