Building a Robot from Scratch

Robotics as an engineering science is about as multi-disciplinary as it gets. There’s electronics, motion control, hardware, dynamics, kinematics, user interface, and a whole slew of other very complicated components that eventually create a useful robot. As a contract programmer, I usually only touch the high-level software side. However, with a few weeks to myself recently, I’ve been taking steps to more fully understand the rest of the picture.

Fair warning: this post is a little different from the ones I’ve written so far. It’s not terribly practical or immediately relevant to programming robots so feel free to move along. However, if you’re interested in the steps I’m taking to ultimately build my own completely functional robot arm from scratch, read on. (There might even be some pretty pictures towards the end.)