Hi, i'm a student about to embark on a project in robotics, I aim to design and construct a simple robot (movement on wheels, simple senses, etc) I have the summer to complete all my reasearch and begin my preliminary designs.

My question is, what is the best programming language to use in the field of robotics?

I hear that both Pyhton and Lisp are good choices, i have experience in Pascal and VB, I have the entire summer and help from experienced teachers to learn this language, any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ashley

Have you already decided what kind of hardware you will be using? I don't think there are facilities for coding in Python or Lisp for most embedded robotics systems, although they are good languages and worth learning.

C is most often used with microcontrollers, because it has a good balance of speed and useability. Assembly language is used for additional speed and control where needed, but it's hardware-specific and tricky to learn.

At present I have no specific hardware choices, would it be worthwhile to seek a system that supports a particular language or would you consider other factors (size, power requirements, etc) more important?

Also, do you consider this type of project to warrant a minamlistic single board computer or would a custom array of individually programmed microcontrollers be more sensible?

Cost is also a large issue as the project will be mainly self funded.

regards
Ashley

For simple robots, PIC and Atmega microcontrollers are perfect. They cost very little and programming them is easy. There are a lot of variants with a different number of I/O pins and other features. There is sufficient processing power, so there's probably no need to use more than one chip.

PIC microcontrollers make sense, I have had previous experience with them before and they are supported at my college which means commendeering some would further cut down on costs.