What you need for this book
The book is all about how to build a robot. To start with this book, you should have some hardware. The robot can be built from scratch, or you can buy a differential-drive configuration robot with an encoder feedback. You should buy a controller board, such as Texas Instruments Launchpad, for embedded processing. You should have at least a laptop/net book for the entire robot process. In this book, we will use Intel NUC for robot processing. It’s very compact in size and delivers high performance. For the 3D vision, you should have 3D sensors, such as laser scanner, Kinect, and Asus Xtion Pro.
In the software section, you should have a good understanding on how to work with GNU/Linux commands. You should also have a good knowledge of Python. You should install Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS to work with the examples. If you have knowledge about ROS, OpenCV, OpenNI, and PCL, it will be a great add-on. You have to install ROS Indigo to test these examples.
