Not long ago, it was very difficult to build a hobby robot capable of interesting behaviors because you had to design and build nearly everything yourself. Today, robotics can be a fantastic hobby for nearly anyone because technology has advanced to the point that most of the complicated things you need can be purchased for reasonable prices. Unfortunately, even if you purchase the required sensors and motor controllers you still need to interface them with a microcontroller and write complicated drivers to handle all the communication, timing, and interrupts before you can even start building robot applications. At least you did until now. The RobotBASIC Robot Operating System (RROS) provides the hardware interface and all the low-level software needed for a variety of sensors and motors in a single 24-pin chip available from www.RobotBASIC.org. Since the chip does all the hard work for you, experienced hobbyists can build interesting robots in a couple of hours and even those with no background in programming or electronics can do far more than they ever imagined in a couple of days.

The purpose of this book is to take a novice hobbyist on a step-by-step journey that teaches robot-programming by building low-cost robots capable of roaming a cluttered room, hugging a wall, and following a line. In the end, these individual behaviors will be combined to demonstrate how robots can handle a reasonably complex task without human intervention. If you have an interest in robotics this book can help you discover the joy of building and programming your own robot with projects you can actually complete.