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 3. Building a Tracked Vehicle That Can Plan Its Own Path

Now that you are comfortable using Raspberry Pi, the next project you'll tackle is building a tracked robot that can explore and map a room autonomously.

In this chapter, you'll learn the following:

  • How to use the General-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins to control the speed of a DC motor

  • How to control your mobile platform programmatically using Raspberry Pi

  • How to connect Raspberry Pi to a USB sonar sensor

  • How to connect a digital compass to Raspberry Pi

  • How to plan a path for your tracked vehicle