welcome to the robot handbook.

this won't be about the giant mechanical warriors in console games, nor autonomous devices used by the military and bomb squads. it isn't even about lego mindstorms and other similar electronics kits or clever household gadgets like vacuum cleaners. i will be discussing software robots and agents, from simple task scheduling to complex autonomous systems that interact with remote services and perform intelligently.

the systems described will include: irc bots for file serving or channel management, stock market trading and gambling systems, automated interactions with paypal, ebay and amazon web services to create intelligent sales and marketing agents, research web crawlers and spiders, remote control systems (including tools that can exploit vulnerabilitieas and take over machines), repetitive task automation, including gui manipulation and testing, and anything else i or readers can think of...

additionally, this will be a repository for articles, reference material and source code for software robots. these will be part of the background material for my proposed book on robots, and i will be posting beta chapters for review here. hopefully these will assemble into a useful resource for software robot builders and designers, and even eventually produce a real paper book!