Book Image

Python Robotics Projects

By : Prof. Diwakar Vaish
Book Image

Python Robotics Projects

By: Prof. Diwakar Vaish

Overview of this book

Robotics is a fast-growing industry. Multiple surveys state that investment in the field has increased tenfold in the last 6 years, and is set to become a $100-billion sector by 2020. Robots are prevalent throughout all industries, and they are all set to be a part of our domestic lives. This book starts with the installation and basic steps in configuring a robotic controller. You'll then move on to setting up your environment to use Python with the robotic controller. You'll dive deep into building simple robotic projects, such as a pet-feeding robot, and more complicated projects, such as machine learning enabled home automation system (Jarvis), vision processing based robots and a self-driven robotic vehicle using Python. By the end of this book, you'll know how to build smart robots using Python.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Finding the limits


The robotic arm kit is a fairly easy one to procure from eBay or Amazon. This is not very difficult to assemble and will require a few hours to prepare. Some of the robotic arm kits might not ship with servo motors, in which case, you may have to order it separately. I would say go for the kit that comes bundled with the servos, as there can be compatibility issues if you choose to order servos separately.

As you know, these servos will work using PWM and it's not hard to control them either. So, let's go straight onto it and see what we can do. Once you have assembled the robotic arm kit, connect the wires of the servos as follows:

Now, firstly, we need to know what are the maximum physical limits of every single servo connected on our robot. There are various techniques to do that. The very basic one is to measure it physically. This method can be good but you won't be able to ever utilize the full potential of the servo motor as you would be having some degree of error...