Book Image

Raspberry Pi Robotic Blueprints

Book Image

Raspberry Pi Robotic Blueprints

Overview of this book

The Raspberry Pi is a series of credit card-sized single-board computers developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The Raspberry Pi is known as a tiny computer built on a single circuit board. It runs a Linux operating system, and has connection ports for various peripherals so that it can be hooked up to sensors, motors, cameras, and more. Raspberry Pi has been hugely popular among hardware hobbyists for various projects, including robotics. This book gives you an insight into implementing several creative projects using the peripherals provided by Raspberry Pi. To start, we’ll walk through the basic robotics concepts that the world of Raspberry Pi offers us, implementing wireless communication to control your robot from a distance. Next, we demonstrate how to build a sensible and a visionary robot, maximizing the use of sensors and step controllers. After that, we focus on building a wheeled robot that can draw and play hockey. To finish with a bang, we’ll build an autonomous hexcopter, that is, a flying robot controlled by Raspberry Pi. By the end of this book, you will be a maestro in applying an array of different technologies to create almost any imaginable robot.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Robotic Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Adding Raspberry Pi to a Humanoid Robot

Modifying an RC car with Raspberry Pi is a wonderful project, but you can take this idea even further by modifying different toys with Raspberry Pi. One class of toys that are excellent candidates for our project are a set of robot toys by WowWee. You can purchase these toys from the company directly at http://wowwee.com/, but you can also find used versions of these toys on eBay for a significantly lower price.

In this chapter, you'll learn the following:

  • How to send and receive voice commands

  • How to interpret commands and initiate actions

There are several toys that have excellent possibilities. One such toy is the WowWee Roboraptor. The following is an image of this robot:

Another option is the WowWee Robosapien. A picture of this robot is given in the following image:

You'll use this robot for your project, as it has more functionality and is easier to modify. Specifically, you're going to connect to the internal serial bus so that you, not...