Robots seem to be everywhere these days. Not only in movies but also in our day-to-day lives. They vacuum floors, play with children, and build automobiles. These new machines are quickly migrating from university and government labs to our homes, offices, schools, and playgrounds. A similar migration has occurred in recent years with computers.
A good part of this migration, as in the case of computers, is that the untrained but interested general population has been able to take part in the development of these new machines. A big reason for this is the introduction of inexpensive hardware and free, open source hardware. Initially, it was Arduino, an inexpensive processor developed for the do-it-yourself crowd, which enabled normal people to create robotics projects with complex functionality. More recently, Raspberry Pi has extended this capability by providing an inexpensive, small, but powerful Linux computer for these projects.
This second edition is designed to allow you to take full advantage of the capabilities of Raspberry Pi in your robotics projects. It will not only teach you how to use the USB port to add additional hardware capabilities, but it will also show you how to connect the hardware to the GPIO as well. It will provide a step-by-step guide to get you well on your way to building your very own amazing robotics projects.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Raspberry Pi, helps you to power up your Raspberry Pi, connect it to a keyboard, mouse, display, and remote computer, and begin to access all that potential computing power.
Chapter 2, Programming Raspberry Pi, teaches you the basics of how to program the Raspberry Pi, both in Python and in the C programming languages.
Chapter 3, Providing Speech Input and Output, teaches your Raspberry Pi to both speak and listen.
Chapter 4, Adding Vision to Raspberry Pi, shows you how to use standard USB and Raspberry Pi cameras to allow your robotics projects to see.
Chapter 5, Creating Mobile Robots on Wheels, shows you how to connect the Raspberry Pi to a mobile wheeled platform and control its motors, so your robots can be mobile.
Chapter 6, Controlling the Movement of a Robot with Legs, teaches you how to make your robot walk.
Chapter 7, Avoiding Obstacles Using Sensors, shows you how to sense the world around you. Now that your robot is mobile, you'll want to avoid or find objects.
Chapter 8, Going Truly Mobile – The Remote Control of Your Robot, shows you how to control your robot wirelessly—you'll want your robot to move around untethered by cables.
Chapter 9, Using a GPS Receiver to Locate Your Robot, shows you how to use a GPS receiver so that your robot knows where it is—if your robot is mobile, it might get lost.
Chapter 10, System Dynamics, focuses on how to bring it all together to make complex robots since you've got lots of capability.
Chapter 11, By Land, Sea, and Air, shows you how to add capabilities to robots that sail, fly, and even go under the water.
Here's a partial list of the software you will need for the book:
7-Zip: This is a utility to archive and unarchive software
Image Writer for Windows: This is used to write images to an SD card
WinSCP: This provides the ability to transfer files to/from a PC
PuTTY: This allows the user remote access to the Raspberry Pi
VNC Server/VNC Viewer: This allows the user remote access to the graphical interface of the Raspberry Pi
This book is for anyone who is keen on using the Raspberry Pi to create robotics projects that have previously been the domain of the research labs of major universities or defense departments. Some programming background is useful, but if you know how to use a personal computer you can, with the aid of the step-by-step instructions in this book, construct complex robotics projects that can move, talk, listen, see, swim, or fly.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Go to the /home/Raspbian/Desktop directory."
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
a = input("Input value: ")
b = input("Input second value: ")
c = a + b
print cAny command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd /home/Raspbian/Desktop
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Go to the Raspbian section and select the .zip file just to the right of the image identifier."
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