Book Image

BeagleBone By Example

By : Pei JIA, Jayakarthigeyan Prabakar, Alexander Hiam
Book Image

BeagleBone By Example

By: Pei JIA, Jayakarthigeyan Prabakar, Alexander Hiam

Overview of this book

BeagleBone is a low cost, community-supported development platform to develop a variety of electronic projects. This book will introduce you to BeagleBone and get you building fun, cool, and innovative projects with it. Start with the specifications of BeagleBone Black and its operating systems, then get to grips with the GPIOs available in BeagleBone Black. Work through four types of exciting projects: building real-time physical computing systems, home automation, image processing for a security system, and building your own tele-controlled robot and learn the fundamentals of a variety of projects in a single book. By the end of this book, you will be able to write code for BeagleBone in order to operate hardware and impart decision-making capabilities with the help of efficient coding in Python.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
BeagleBone By Example
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Differential-drive robots


Differential-drive is a control mechanism that is being used in most situations requiring control of navigating robots, especially for indoor applications. For beginners as well, this is considered the best control mechanism to get started with robots. Most indoor navigating robots used in industries and homes use this very mechanism.

The concept of this mechanism is to use two separately driven motors coupled with the wheels of the robot, separated by a distance and placed on a fixed common horizontal axis. The base also includes one or multiple caster wheels or roller-ball wheels attached to it to maintain equilibrium.

Here is how it looks:

In the diagram, you can see two different configurations of differential-drive robots. The one on the left has two casters, while the other has just one. These two are one of the most commonly used differential-drive system configurations used. Both of them have different kinematics during navigation. If you want to look into...