Help for starters

[rrr]

Hi all and thanks for this great website + forum

I finished my Bsc in mechanical engineering in the field of control&robotics and now I'm going for my masters in robust control. The thing is that I know( hope that a lot ) about control&robotics but only from the theoretical side. for instance, I was in a group that participated in the DARPA challenge (unfortunately we did not win ) but what we did there is control ideas- no real stuff. I decided I have to get some real experience of robots so maybe I will be able to build a small robot to test the thesis I'm working on. I wanted to ask, where should I start? should I build the 50$ robot? maybe to start with arduino? I know to program well in matlab and a bit in C
Thanks for your advice

[waltr]

The $50 Bot is a great place to start for getting practical experience. That project can be expanded on in many ways once you get the basics down.
It uses the same family processor that the Ardiuno uses so these would complement each other nicely. Coding is done in C so you have a good start on this part.