I get many questions from people about how I think kids and adults should get started in robotics, how they should progress, and what they should buy, to learn about robotics. This is a quick guide to help you get going.

By Martin Cote

The Arduino family of micro controllers has quickly become a go-to board for hobbyists due to its ease of use. Often times roboticists must create communication protocols to allow their embedded hardware to communicate with a computer. One of the most powerful aspects of ROS is that it can communicate with a large variety of hardware. That’s where rosserial comes in! Rosserial is a general protocol for sending ROS messages over a serial interface, such as the UART on Arduino. This allows you to easily interface any sensors attached to Arduino into your ROS environment. Read on to learn more!