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.

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

1. Log in or register at www.packtpub.com.
2. Select the SUPPORT tab.
3. Click on Code Downloads & Errata.
4. Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

• WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
• Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
• 7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learning-Robotics-using-Python-Second-Edition. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/LearningRoboticsusingPythonSecondEdition_ColorImages.pdf.

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: " The first procedure is to create a world file and save it with the .world file extension."

A block of code is set as follows:

<xacro:include filename=”$(find
 chefbot_description)/urdf/chefbot_gazebo.urdf.xacro”/>
 <xacro:include filename=”$(find
 chefbot_description)/urdf/chefbot_properties.urdf.xacro”/>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ roslaunch chefbot_gazebo chefbot_empty_world.launch