Summary

This chapter outlined a suggested process for developing your to-do list as you develop your robot project. This process is called systems engineering. Our first step was to create use cases or descriptions of how the robot is to behave from a user’s perspective. Then, we created more detail behind the use cases by creating storyboards, where we went step by step through the use case. Our example followed the robot finding and recognizing toys, before picking them up and putting them in the toy box. We extracted our hardware and software needs, creating a to-do list of what the robot will be able to do. Finally, we wrote a specification for one of our critical sensors: the camera.

In the next chapter, we will dive into our first robot task – teaching the robot to recognize toys using computer vision and neural networks.