Grimmett - BeagleBone robotic projects

Richard Grimmett has always been fascinated by computers and electronics from his very first programming project that used Fortran on punch cards. He has a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Leadership Studies. He also has 26 years of experience in the Radar and Telecommunications industries, and even has one of the original brick phones. He now teaches Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Brigham Young University - Idaho where his office is filled with many of his robotics projects.

I would certainly like to thank my wife and family for providing me the time and wonderful, supportive environment that encourages me to take on projects such as this one. I would also like to thank my students; they always amaze and inspire me with their creativity when released from the boredom of standard educational practices.

lvaro Garca Gmez is a computer engineer at the University of Valladolid (Spain) and a technical administrator of IT systems. He was focused on software development, but a short time later robotics and embedded devices aroused his curiosity. Now he is specialized in machine learning and autonomous robotics, which involve his two passions: computing and electronics. Now he is working in his own company that develops free software and hardware.

Lihang Li received his B.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), China in 2012 and is now pursuing his M.S. degree in Computer Vision at National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR) from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IACAS).

He is a member of Dian Group from HUST and mainly concentrated on Embedded System Development when he was an undergraduate. He is familiar with Embedded Linux, ARM, DSP, and various communication interfaces (I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, and ZigBee, among others). He took part in a competition called The Asia-Pacific Robot Contest (ABU Robocon) with his team in 2012 and secured third place among 29 teams in China.

As a graduate student, he is focusing on Computer Vision and specially on SLAM algorithms. In his free time, he likes to take part in Open Source Activities and now is President of the Open Source Club, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Also, building a multicopter is his hobby and he is with a team called OpenDrone from Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG).

His interest includes: Linux, Open Source, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Computer Vision algorithms, Machine Learning and Data Mining, and various programming languages.

You can find him at his personal website, http://hustcalm.me.

Many thanks to my girlfriend Jingjing Shao; it was her encouragement to push me to be a reviewer for this book. And I appreciate her kindness though sometimes I can't spare time for her. Also, I must thank all the team: Leena, who is a very good Project Coordinator, and the other reviewers, though we haven't met, I'm happy to work with you.

Derek Molloy is a senior lecturer in the School of Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering & Computing at Dublin City University, Ireland. Since 1997, he has lectured in object-oriented programming, 3D Computer Graphics, and Digital Electronics at postgraduate and undergraduate levels. His research interests are in the fields of Computer & Machine Vision, 3D Graphics and Visualization, and e-learning. He is a key academic member of the Centre for Image Processing and Analysis (CIPA) at DCU. He has published his works widely in international journals and conferences, including an important textbook, Machine Vision Algorithms in Java , Springer (2001). In his spare time he runs the DerekMolloyDCU YouTube channel that contains many instructional videos on the use of the BeagleBone, and he integrates everything on his personal blog at www.derekmolloy.ie.

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Preface

We live in an amazing age. We are mostly aware of how amazing it is as we live in an age where major changes to how we live occur well within a lifetime, sometimes within a few years. Nowhere is this more evident than in the general area of technology, and the specific area of computers. Not so many years ago, certainly within the lifespan of most of the baby-boomer generation, computers were distant machines kept in the backrooms of large corporations or universities. Access to them was tightly controlled. If you wanted to program them, you punched your computer cards, fed them into the card reader, and then, after an hour or so of wait, you went to receive your computer printout. This was, I regret to reveal, part of my first experience with a computer.