Have you ever thought about making a robot that could recognize faces? Did you want it to shoot darts or meet new people? Getting a robot to act intelligent requires a lot of computer science, but we can still use our favorite language to accomplish these tasks.
We'll see a few demos and look at some of the projects that help us abstract away the sciency bits so we can stay focused on making an awesome robot.
I like to have fun at a conference. What is more fun that seeing a demo go really well, or totally fail? Is there any better demo than seeing a nerf gun "search" for a target and try to shoot it? What about a lonely roomba that wanders around trying to make friends?
This talk is focused on being fun and getting people over the initial resistance to dive into a robotics project. We'll look at some tools and libraries that allow a ruby developer to make awesome robots without having to learn embedded C or break out their soldering iron.