Book Image

Getting Started with Python for the Internet of Things

By : Tim Cox, Steven Lawrence Fernandes, Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor, Prof. Diwakar Vaish
Book Image

Getting Started with Python for the Internet of Things

By: Tim Cox, Steven Lawrence Fernandes, Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor, Prof. Diwakar Vaish

Overview of this book

This Learning Path takes you on a journey in the world of robotics and teaches you all that you can achieve with Raspberry Pi and Python. It teaches you to harness the power of Python with the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Raspberry Pi zero to build superlative automation systems that can transform your business. You will learn to create text classifiers, predict sentiment in words, and develop applications with the Tkinter library. Things will get more interesting when you build a human face detection and recognition system and a home automation system in Python, where different appliances are controlled using the Raspberry Pi. With such diverse robotics projects, you'll grasp the basics of robotics and its functions, and understand the integration of robotics with the IoT environment. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have covered everything from configuring a robotic controller, to creating a self-driven robotic vehicle using Python. • Raspberry Pi 3 Cookbook for Python Programmers - Third Edition by Tim Cox, Dr. Steven Lawrence Fernandes • Python Programming with Raspberry Pi by Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor • Python Robotics Projects by Prof. Diwakar Vaish
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Basics of a robotic arm


If you see a human body, then one of the most distinctive parts that makes us able to be different than most other species is the arm. It is the part of the body that we use to do most of the work.

The human arm is a very complex mechanism of joints and muscles that work in tandem to give it the dexterity that we know it for. Take an example of our shoulder joint. If you pay attention, then you will notice that it has the ability to move up and down, right and left, and even rotate on its own axis, and all this while it just has one single joint, which we know as a ball joint.

When we talk about a robotic arm on a robot, we are undoubtedly talking about a complex arrangement of actuators with the body, otherwise known as a chassis, to get the desired motion in a three-dimensional space.

Now, let's understand some of the basic parts of any robotic arm. The first parts are the actuators. We can use motors to control the robotic arm; however, as we have studied earlier...