[vcf-midatlantic] books about robots

[Dan Roganti]

On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 10:11 PM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic <
vcf-midatlantic at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:

> Remember last week we discussed books about robots in the HOPE thread?
> Both books arrived today. One of them, "How to design & build your own
> custom robot" by David Heiserman, is very deep -- heavy reading. The other,
> "How to build a computer-controlled robot" by Tod Loofbourrow, contains a
> reasonable project that we as a group can build (but not in time for HOPE
> unless we really bust ass.)
>
> In the preface of
> ​​
> Loofbourrow's book, he wrote: "I want to thank the members of the Amateur
> Computer Group of New Jersey, whose suggestions have helped make Mike
> (that's what he calls the robot -EK) what he is today."
>
> Googled the author. He went on to a nice career in robotics. I sent him an
> intro tweet via our official VCFed account. Apparently he lives in the
> Boston area. Maybe we can get him down to the museum for a talk one day.
>


You might want to show a comparison of then present day robot technology. A
lot of which inspired many of us during the 70s to build our homebrew robot
projects. There were several people on the fore front of robot technology,
beginning with Hans Moravec and his Stanford cart robot with vision
recognition. He is currently a faculty member at the Robotics Institute at
CMU here in Pittsburgh.
http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/cart.htm
And there was some industry projects, most popular among them, Shakey.
Designed by some of the leading computer scientists of the era, including
Bertram Raphael a former student of Marvin Minsky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakey_the_robot
​There were even notable research projects from the 60s too
And there were books about this too, just don't recall which ones without
looking yet.
I can try to dig out my motors used in my old robot project from
​
Loofbourrow's book
Dan