Book Image

Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects

By : Dr. Richard Grimmett
Book Image

Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects

By: Dr. Richard Grimmett

Overview of this book

<p>Robotics development is accelerating, and an amazing array of new hardware and software capabilities are available to anyone with an interest in the area. Robots will soon be a part of our everyday life, and it will soon be as important to know how they work as it is to know how a computer works. Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized, fully capable PC that can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, such as spreadsheets, word processing, and games.</p> <p>This book starts with the essentials of turning on the basic hardware. It provides the capability to interpret your commands and have your robot initiate actions. By the time you are through, you’ll have robots that can speak, listen, and move in a number of amazing ways.</p> <p>This book is a step-by-step projects guide to unlocking some complex and interesting capabilities of Raspberry Pi. Teaching you to use Raspberry Pi from scratch, this book will discuss a wide range of capabilities that can be achieved with it. These capabilities include voice recognition, human-like speech simulation, computer vision, motor control, GPS location, and wireless control. You will then learn how to combine these capabilities to create your own robotics projects.</p> <p>By the time you have completed this book, you will be able to use Raspberry Pi to create some complex and fascinating robotics projects with a vast array of capabilities.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Connecting Raspberry Pi to the mobile platform using a servo controller


Now that you have a legged platform and a servo motor controller, you are ready to make your project walk! Before you begin, you'll need some background on servo motors. Servo motors are somewhat similar to DC motors. However, there is an important difference: while DC motors are generally designed to move in a continuous way, rotating 360 degrees at a given speed, servo motors are generally designed to move at angles within a limited set. In other words, in the DC motor world, you generally want your motors to spin at a continuous rotation speed that you control. In the servo world, you want to control the movement of your motor to a specific position. For more information on how servos work, visit http://www.seattlerobotics.org/guide/servos.html or http://www.societyofrobots.com/actuators_servos.shtml.

Connecting the hardware

To make your project walk, you first need to connect the servo motor controller to the servos...