Table of Contents

• 1 What Is a Robot Anyway?
• 2 Robot Vocabularies 
• 3 RSVP: Robot Scenario Visual Planning 
• 4 Checking the Actual Capabilities of Your Robot 
• 5 A Close Look at Sensors 
• 6 Programming the Robot’s Sensors 
• 7 Programming Motors and Servos 
• 8 Getting Started with Autonomy: Building Your Robot’s Softbot Counterpart 
• 9 Robot SPACES 
• 10 An Autonomous Robot Needs STORIES 
• 11 Putting It All Together: How Midamba Programmed His First Autonomous Robot 
• 12 Open Source SARAA Robots for All!

About the Author

Cameron Hughes is a computer and robot programmer. He holds a post as a Software Epistemologist at Ctest Laboratories where he is currently working on A.I.M. (Alternative Intelligence for Machines) and A.I.R. (Alternative Intelligence for Robots) technologies. Cameron is the lead AI Engineer for the Knowledge Group at Advanced Software Construction Inc., a builder of intelligent robot controllers and software-based knowledge components. He holds a staff appointment as a Programmer/Analyst at Youngstown State University. Tracey Hughes is a senior software and graphics programmer at Ctest Laboratories and Advanced Software Construction Inc. where she develops user interfaces and information and epistemic visualization software systems. Her work includes methods of graphically showing what robots and computers are thinking. She is on the design and implementation teams for the East-Sidaz robots at Ctest as well.

Both Cameron and Tracey Hughes are members of the advisory board for the NREF (National Robotics Education Foundation) and members of the Oak Hill Collaborative Robotics Maker Space. They are project leaders of the technical team for the NEOACM CSI/CLUE Robotics Challenge and regularly organize and direct robot programming workshops for the Arduino, Mindstorms EV3, LEGO NXT, and RS Media robot platforms. Cameron and Tracey are two of the authors of Build Your Own Teams of Robots with LEGO® Mindstorms® NXT and Bluetooth, published by McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics, January 2013. They have written many books and blogs on Software Development and Artificial Intelligence. They’ve also written books on multicore, multithreaded programming, Linux rapid application development, objectoriented programming, and parallel programming in C++.