How to start building robots

A good place to start would be Robot Builders Bonanza, 2nd Edition, by Gordon McComb. Gordon does a pretty thorough job of covering the subject, more so than any one other book that I know of. There are other books, of course, that go into more depth for narrower subject ranges. But for your first book on building robots, Gordon's would be the one I recommend.

-Brian

I totally second that...Gordon's book got me started off. It's a great place to begin.

-- Shawn

Cool, Iv just started myself. I confess that I have yet to buy any of the books recommended to me in the last three weeks. (The extent of my robot building career)

I had some old RC planes and car parts lying around (helped a guy move, said he didn't want the 20 year old part any longer), so I had some stuff to work with. I have continued to add to my collection of junk by regularly visiting the goodwill outlet center and finding RC cars. I just got a dozen, barley used Sanyo NiCad AA's for about a buck (they came in a really great dual motor track driven RC toy that will be the base for my next robo project.

I wont presume to tell you where to start, I will tell you how I got started, but first, where Im at might be useful.

Im working on my first robo project, an autonomous rover based on an RC truck frame. I striped the body and electronics (kept the motor and drive train) the steering servo for the RC toy had a bunch of wires I didnt know what to do with, so I ripped it out, modified the chassis to accept a "standard" RC servo (3 wires available at any hobby shop for cheep)

I then added the robots brain. I chose an oopic-R controller, based on what I thought was a good set of requirements:

Low Price

Out of the box support for direct PC programming (I did not want to have to build a circuit just to get started slinging code)

Out of the box "standard" servo support, same reason as above, I wanted to just connect my servos, sling some code and go.

Out of the box "serial interface" support, for future expandability, I plan to hook my robot up to an old $50 eBay ipaq or my outdated palm os based hand held.

Built in power regulation, again, I didn't want to build a circuit for such mundane tasks as providing power to the PIC.

Good development tools (IDE) and decent user base with active forum

I think there are several devices that meet these requirements, but I'm happy with the oopic-R and am glad I chose it.

My robot is twitching; I have a scanning sonar /IR sensor array that just looks plain spify when scanning. The oopic language has an event driven model that is really great for doing what I want to do, which is to rove around the outside world and not bump into anything! Next step is to make it chase my cat.. But that's a ways off! (What I relay am trying to do is play with emergent behaviors.)

Well, that's my story