Re: Lua, Robotics, and a 13 year old...

[Erik Hougaard <erik@...>]

 On 25-07-2010 18:30, Mike McGonagle wrote
> A friend of mine has a 13 year old kid who is interested in Robots. I
> am wanting to suggest that he learn a programming language (Lua in
> particular) and learn a bit about building a computer (as Robots are
> specialized computers). As Lua appears to be a language designed for
> embedded systems, I was wondering if anyone out there could give me
> some links to sites that deal with Robotic projects that are using
> Lua, so that I could pass them along to the kid to encourage him to
> learn Lua. Also, as a related topic, if there are any projects that
> are dealing with AI, that would be great, too. That would be something
> else for him down the road.
I have competed with Lua based robots for the last 11 years in the 
danish Robocup Competition with different incarnations of the robot 
"Crazy Ivan". We have used Lua for all high level logic in the robot. 
Lua is a great language for robot logics, but with many pitfalls.

I would recommend the Lego Mindstorm road - and lets the kid develops 
his own path from that, some like the software side, some like the 
hardware side but in both cases the Mindstorm kits are a great platform 
to start on. And let him start with the standard mindstorm software and 
he hit the limitations of that, enter Lua :) But the standard software 
is a good primer for robotics - lua is not :)

/Erik