Product Description

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®.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #492886 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 440 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

OK high-level guide to Java control of robots
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

Very good book on this subject.
If you want to control a microprocessor with your PC using Java programs then this is the book to show you how.

You will need to know Java in order to understand the programs. You'll have to set up the Java communications Api, which is just a matter of downloading it from the Sun website and then placing the files in the correct directories on you PC.

He illustrates the use of the Basic Stamp II [...]. This is a great microprocessor to get started with because it's very easy to use and they have great support for beginners. You don't need to know how to program the Basic Stamp as a prerequisite, you can learn this while doing it using a very simple dialect of Basic programming. You can also use the same microprocessor programs he wrote for the Stamp for use with PicBasic, (with some editing) since they're very similar.

You don't need experience programming microprocessors, you learn as you do.
You do need to know Java in order to understand the PC programs written in Java. Even without previous Java experience you can still compile and run the programs from this book and make the "Robots".

A Good Way To Get Started Quickly
To go with this book be sure to visit www.scottsbots.com. Here you will find color pictures and additional description of the various robots described in the book. (There might also be an update or two to the software presented in the book).

This is one of the few books around that combine both software (Java in this case) and hardware design. Building working robots require both, and here both are presented, although the real focus of the book is on the software. The hardware is specialty modules that are designed to handle various robotic functions common in modern robotics. These include fairly complex subjects such as speech and vision.

The focus of the book, however is on the software. The hardware items basically are only converters that change sensed input into a stream of bits, or take a stream of bits and then convert them into motion, speech or whatever. Accepting this kind of input and outputting the appropriate control secquences is the subject of this book. It is a book that summarizes currently available components and works with them to make functioning units.

It's a great place to start learning about or working in robotics.