Book Image

Learn Robotics Programming

By : Danny Staple
Book Image

Learn Robotics Programming

By: Danny Staple

Overview of this book

We live in an age where the most difficult human tasks are now automated. Smart and intelligent robots, which will perform different tasks precisely and efficiently, are the requirement of the hour. A combination of Raspberry Pi and Python works perfectly when making these kinds of robots. Learn Robotics Programming starts by introducing you to the basic structure of a robot, along with how to plan, build, and program it. As you make your way through the book, you will gradually progress to adding different outputs and sensors, learning new building skills, and writing code for interesting behaviors with sensors. You’ll also be able to update your robot, and set up web, phone, and Wi-Fi connectivity in order to control it. By the end of the book, you will have built a clever robot that can perform basic artificial intelligence (AI) operations.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Write a script to follow a predetermined path

So, we now get to the first behavior that feels like a robot.

Let's make a quick sketch of a path for us to get our robot to follow:

Path for our robot

In the previous diagram, I've drawn a path. The straight lines are for driving forward, the 1s mean one second. We don't yet have a way to consider distance traveled, only time. We may be able to guess at times relative to distances, but they will not be very precise. The gentle curves are a turn where we slow one motor down with respect to the other.

The final spiral means a victory spin on the spot when the path is complete—we can do this by putting one motor in reverse while the other drives forward.

Let's write this code. First, we want the imports, sleep and robot. But before we do anything, let's make some helper functions for this behavior...