Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects - Second Edition

By : Richard Grimmett
Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects - Second Edition

By: Richard Grimmett

Overview of this book

BeagleBone Blue is effectively a small, light, cheap computer in a similar vein to Raspberry Pi and Arduino. It has all of the extensibility of today’s desktop machines, but without the bulk, expense, or noise. This project guide provides step-by-step instructions that enable anyone to use this new, low-cost platform in some fascinating robotics projects. By the time you are finished, your projects will be able to see, speak, listen, detect their surroundings, and move in a variety of amazing ways. The book begins with unpacking and powering up the components. This includes guidance on what to purchase and how to connect it all successfully, and a primer on programming the BeagleBone Blue. You will add additional software functionality available from the open source community, including making the system see using a webcam, hear using a microphone, and speak using a speaker. You will then learn to use the new hardware capability of the BeagleBone Blue to make your robots move, as well as discover how to add sonar sensors to avoid or find objects. Later, you will learn to remotely control your robot through iOS and Android devices. At the end of this book, you will see how to integrate all of these functionalities to work together, before developing the most impressive robotics projects: Drone and Submarine.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Dynamic path planning with your mobile platform


With the three sensors providing coverage to check for barriers from the front as well as from either side you can add to your path planning capabilities. You can use the program that you wrote in Chapter 3,Making the Unit Mobile - Controlling Wheeled Movement. Before you start, here are some basics of dynamic path planning. Let's first address the problem where you know where you want to go and need to execute a path without barriers and then add in barriers.

Basic path planning

In order to talk about dynamic path planning, that is, planning a path where you don't know what barriers you might encounter, you'll need a framework to understand where your robot is as well as to determine the location of the goal. One common framework is an x and y grid. Here is a drawing of such a grid:

There are three key points:

  • The lower-left point is a fixed reference position. The directions x and y are also fixed; all other positions will be measured with respect...