To get the most out of this book

The book is all about building 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 encoder feedback. You should buy a controller board such as Texas instruments LaunchPad for embedded processing and should have at least a laptop/netbook for entire robot processing. In this book, we are using Intel NUC for robot processing, it is very compact in size and delivering high performance. For 3D vision, you should have a 3D sensor such as laser scanner, Kinect, or Orbecc Astra.

In the software section, you should have a good understanding in working with GNU/Linux commands and have good knowledge in Python too. You should install Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to work with the examples. If you have knowledge in ROS, OpenCV, OpenNI, and PCL, this will help. You have to install ROS Kinect/Melodic for these examples.