Beginners Guide To Robotics - I (Introduction)

Humanoid

Wheeled Robot

part 1(Go to part 2, Index page)

What is a Robot?

“Any machine in a way can be called a Robot!”

Robots are not just human like machines with hands and legs(humanoids). They can also have wheels(wheeled robots), may have wings to fly(RC planes, Quad-copters),or may not be moving at all! They don't always have to be autonomous or be running on a microcontroller or a microprocessor. Robots can me simple machines like your pocket calculator or as complex as the curiosity rover.

 Mars rovers : Sojourner, MER and Curiosity.

This definition is more of a general perspective and not to be taken to the specifics. Even though I've been building robots for quite a while, this is the first time I tried to define robotics! So it doesn't really matter. For me robotics is a wide and versatile field of technology. Even "JARVIS" in the Iron Man/Avengers series is an AI Robot which doesn't physically exist! There's no reason to debate when we conventionally use a 'robots.txt' file to guide search engine “robots” to find this very post! 

How to Start?

“It all starts with the curiosity, which creates the enthusiasm and becomes a passion...”

You must have seen some cool machines and you want to make some yourself. Or you have a cool idea to experiment with? Or is it that you've seen some fiction, got some dream and wanna see it live and real? First step- Google it! That might just be how you got here! But looking at such a massive field with no pre-idea you might get lost or confused. I remember when I was a kid I wanted to make a “rotor” for my plastic-bottle hovercraft. I wanted at least a picture of it. So I tried to Google “fan” thinking of the “propeller” as a variant of the ceiling fan. The “fan” of the ceiling fan, “propeller” of a motor boat and “rotor” of a helicopter might be technically similar(which I thought) but are different both contextually and in terms of usage. Plus “fan” also has a variety of other meanings. 

Helicopter 'Rotor'

Hovercraft 'Propeller'

Blade of a ceiling 'fan'

What I want to tell you is:

“You need specific terms of limited context to find what you exactly want in a wide field of ideas...”

Unless you know the terms and their context its hard to find something relevant. Lets jump in and introduce the different stages of robot building so you know what to search for and where you're headed.

Continue to part 2 

Thank you for reading !
This is one of my first blog posts. Please feel free to suggest improvements. You can email me (click here). Your feedback will help me produce better content and improve this blog!