The Definitive Guide to Building Java Robots (The Definitive...

The way Scott lays out the book is really good too . . . He explains everything in easy to understand terms and provides sample code that you can use right away.

— Jim Brown, Robots.net

The Definitive Guide to Building Java Robots is for educators, students, hobbyists, and startups looking for Java/hardware interaction. This book shows you how to use your PC to build robots, and how you can interface with a microcontroller to do the basics. You'll learn to design your robot to navigate, see, speak, recognize your face, listen to you, and build maps.

For up-to-the-minute information, check out Scott's Bots, the author's own website.

About The Author
Scott Preston works as a technical architect for a large Columbus consulting firm where he resides with his lovely wife, Emily. Scott has over 15 years of software and electrical experience including positions with The U.S. Navy, Bank One, UUNET, and Covansys Inc., in addition to running his own robotics company, Preston Research LLC, where he gives robotic lectures in conjunction with COSI (Center of Science and Industry) and manufactures small Java-enabled robots called CubeBots®. Preston is also a member of the Java Community Process, and the Central Ohio JUG. Read more on his website, Scott's Bots.

Reader Reviews
It is really difficult to rate this book. If you are a hobbyist who is somewhat Java-savvy and you are looking for a book that gives you rather non-complex code that performs complex tasks primarily by harnessing the power of native as well as open source Java API's, I would give this book four stars. If you are looking for some technical or computational details on some of the interesting topics that the author covers I would give it two stars since there is very little of that in this book. Therefore, considering all possible audiences, I give it 3 stars, or an average rating. This book is not a tutorial on the Java API's that it mentions, but it is the only book I know of that even talks about how to do anything with speech synthesis or voice recognition in Java using the free implementation of the Java Speech API, which is FreeTTS. I actually tried out some of the author's Java speech programs, and they do work as advertised. The author performs his interesting tasks by harnessing the Java Beans activation framework, the Java Communications API for serial port communication, FreeTTS and Sphinx API's for speech applications, the Java Advanced Imaging API and Java Media Framework for computer vision and camera control, and the servlet and JSP API for more complex control of a robot. He has even written his own package that pulls together all of these API's to perform integrated tasks, such as object recognition that integrates image processing, camera control, and speech recognition. Thus, I recommend this for a hobbyist who already knows Java and wants to use that language to control robots at a very high system-level. I do not recommend this book for people looking for theory or algorithms related to the topic of robot control. I notice that Amazon does not show the table of contents so I do that here: 1. A Primer 2. Serial Communication 3. Motion 4. Sensors 5. Speech 6. Vision 7. Navigation 8. Other Topics 9. Sample Programs A. Definitive Guide API (Author's Software) B. Microcontroller Reference C. Robot Parts Reference Comment | | (Report this)