Build powerful robots with the all new BeagleBone Blue
Communicate with your robot and teach it to detect and respond to its environment
Control walking, rolling, swimming, and flying robots with your iOS and Android mobile devices

Who This Book Is For

This book is for anyone who is curious about using new, low-cost hardware to create robotic projects and have previously been the domain of research labs, major universities, or defence departments. Some programming experience would be useful, but if you know how to use a personal computer, you can use this book to construct far more complex systems than you would have thought possible.

What You Will Learn

Power on and configure the BeagleBone Blue
Get to know Simple programming techniques to enable the unique hardware capabilities of the BeagleBone Blue.
Connect standard hardware to enable your projects to see, speak, hear, and move
Build advanced capabilities into your projects, such as GPS and sonar sensors
Build complex projects that can fly, or go under or on the water

In Detail

BeagleBone Blue is effectively a small, light, cheap computer in a similar vein to Raspberry Pi and Arduino. It has all of the extensibility of today's desktop machines, but without the bulk, expense, or noise. This project guide provides step-by-step instructions that enable anyone to use this new, low-cost platform in some fascinating robotics projects. By the time you are finished, your projects will be able to see, speak, listen, detect their surroundings, and move in a variety of amazing ways.

The book begins with unpacking and powering up the components. This includes guidance on what to purchase and how to connect it all successfully, and a primer on programming the BeagleBone Blue. You will add additional software functionality available from the open source community, including making the system see using a webcam, hear using a microphone, and speak using a speaker.

You will then learn to use the new hardware capability of the BeagleBone Blue to make your robots move, as well as discover how to add sonar sensors to avoid or find objects. Later, you will learn to remotely control your robot through iOS and Android devices. At the end of this book, you will see how to integrate all of these functionalities to work together, before developing the most impressive robotics projects: Drone and Submarine.

Style and approach

Develop practical example projects with detailed explanations, combine the projects in a vast number of ways to create different robot designs, or work through them in sequence to discover the full capability of the BeagleBone Blue.