Android Robotics Projects

You might be wondering why some of your friends speak in hushed tones about soldering wires, chips, and robotic parts carrying strange, unheard-of names. Fear not, since you probably own hardware ready-made for your own robotics experiments: any old Android phone gives you a head start in building your own robot. And Android Robotics Projects will show you how to build serious robots.

To begin either development or hardware engineering on the Android, you need to have programming access to your phone. So, you'll need to install Eclipse and use BlueTooth to access the Android hardware itself. But if you want to build a robot using the Android processor as its brain, you'll need to penetrate the mysteries of another microcontroller interfacing with Android: the AVR. Jim Garvin leads you through the early chapters of the book as gently as possible.

From there, Garvin takes you through all the knowledge areas needed to build robots-including movable parts, communications between Android hardware, and Android and Linux APIs for programming. To top it off, you'll explore how to produce your own hardware! From the bread board to your home-brew PCB, Garvin guides you through design and implementation of your robot parts.

No robot can exist without sensors, and you need constraints to allow it to avoid and circumvent obstacles. There is little that one cannot do with the right hardware and a bit of programmming. Ultimately, you can mount your phone on the robot and teach it new tricks, depending on the animal architecture you choose. Of course, there are many possibilities here, and Garvin will also give you pointers for the future.