About the Reviewer

Lentin Joseph is an author, entrepreneur, electronics engineer, robotics enthusiast, machine vision expert, embedded programmer, and the founder and CEO of Qbotics Labs from India.

Lentin completed his bachelor's degree in electronics and communication engineering at the Federal Institute of Science and Technology (FISAT), Kerala. For his final year engineering project, he made a social robot that can interact with people. The project was a huge success and was mentioned in many forms of visual and print media. The main features of this robot were that it could communicate with people and reply intelligently, and it had some image processing capabilities such as face, motion, and color detection. The entire project was implemented using the Python programming language. His interest in robotics, image processing, and Python started with that project.

After his graduation, Lentin worked for 3 years at a start-up company focusing on robotics and image processing. In the meantime, he learned to work with famous robotics software platforms, such as Robot Operating System (ROS), V-REP, and Actin (a robotic simulation tool), and image processing libraries such as OpenCV, OpenNI, and PCL. He also knows about 3D robot design and embedded programming on Arduino and Tiva Launchpad.

After 3 years of work experience, Lentin started a new company called Qbotics Labs, which mainly focuses on research into building some great products in domains such as robotics and machine vision. He maintains a personal website and a technology blog called TechnoLabsz. Lentin publishes his works on his tech blog. He was also a speaker at PyCon2013, India, on the topic Learning Robotics Using Python.

Lentin is the author of the books Learning Robotics Using Python (learn-robotics.com), Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming (mastering-ros.com), and ROS Robotics Project (http://rosrobots.com)—all books were published by Packt Publishing. The first book was about building an autonomous mobile robot using ROS and OpenCV. This book was launched at ICRA 2015 and was featured on the ROS blog, Robohub, OpenCV, the Python website, and various other such forums. The second book is on mastering Robot Operating System, which was also launched at ICRA 2016, and is one of the bestselling books on ROS. The third book is ROS Robotics Project, which was launched in ICRA 2017 and it is also one of the bestselling books on ROS. Along with writing, he reviewed books such as Effective Robotics Programming using ROS, Raspberry Pi Image Processing Programming, and Raspberry Pi Supercomputing and Scientific Programming. He started a new platform called Robocademy.com exclusively for learning robotics using ROS.

Lentin and his team were also winners of the HRATC 2016 challenge conducted as a part of ICRA 2016. He was also a finalist in the ICRA 2015 challenge, HRATC.