You might be wondering why some of your friends speak in hushed tones about soldering wires, chips, and robotic parts carrying strange, unheard-of names. Fear not, since you probably own hardware ready-made for your own robotics experiments: any old Android phone gives you a head start in building your own robot. And Android Robotics Projects will show you how to build serious robots. To begin either development and hardware engineering on the Android, you need to have programming access to your phone. So, you will need to install Eclipse and use Bluetooth to access Android hardware itself. But if you want to build a robot using the Android processor as its brain, you need to penetrate the mysteries of another Microcontroller interfacing with Android: the AVR. Jim Garvin leads you through the early chapters of the book as gently as possible.
