Preface

Although you don’t need to know any robotics before reading through this website, there are some things that can make your learning experience much more pleasant.


Math

To understand the math on this website, it is best to understand basic algebra, trigonometry, geometry. None of the math should exceed high-school level and if it does, there will be links to resources to explain them. Even if math weren’t your strong suit and you skipped all of the equations, you’d still learn a lot!

Programming

Understand basic concepts of programming will definitely come in handy before reading through the project. There are lots of great resources for learning programming:

Knowing syntax of Python would also be helpful, since all of the code examples discussed in the project are written in Python. If you don’t know much about Python, but already know how to program in a different language, Dive into Python 3 is a great place to start.

If you don’t know anything about programming but are interested in learning robotics anyway, you can still read through the chapters – the code is included mainly to showcase possible implementations of the discussed concepts.

Libraries and Classes

Throughout the project, there will be a lot of made-up classes like Motor, Joystick and Gyro. They are only used as placeholders for real classes that you would (likely) have, if you were implementing some of the concepts covered on this website on a platform of your choosing.

About comments

There are a LOT of comments in the examples of code that you are about to see. Way, way more than there should be. I agree that this is considered bad practice for practical purposes and that if you are a relative beginner, you shouldn’t write code in a similar fashion.

However, since the purpose of the code on this website is educational and not to serve as a part of a codebase, I would argue that it is fine to use them to such extent.