Book Image

Hands-On Robotics Programming with C++

By : Dinesh Tavasalkar, Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Hands-On Robotics Programming with C++

By: Dinesh Tavasalkar, Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

C++ is one of the most popular legacy programming languages for robotics, and a combination of C++ and robotics hardware is used in many leading industries. This book will bridge the gap between Raspberry Pi and C/C++ programming and enable you to develop applications for Raspberry Pi. You'll even be able to implement C programs in Raspberry Pi with the WiringPi library. The book will guide you through developing a fully functional car robot and writing programs to move it in different directions. You’ll then create an obstacle-avoiding robot using an ultrasonic sensor. In addition to this, you’ll find out how to control the robot wirelessly using your PC or Mac. This book will also help you work with object detection and tracking using OpenCV, and guide you through exploring face detection techniques. Finally, you will create an Android app and control the robot wirelessly with an Android smartphone. By the end of this book, you will have gained experience in developing a robot using Raspberry Pi and C/C++ programming.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Getting Started with wiringPi on a Raspberry Pi
4
Section 2: Raspberry Pi Robotics
8
Section 3: Face and Object Recognition Robot
12
Section 4: Smartphone-Controlled Robot

Face-tracking robot

The program for turning LEDs on/off and tracking a human face is called Facetrackingrobot.cpp, and you can download it from the Chapter08 folder of this book's GitHub repository.

In the Facetrackingrobot program, we will first detect the face, and then the left eye, right eye, and smile. Once the eyes and smile are detected, we will turn the LEDs on/off. After this, we will create a small dot in the center of the face rectangle, and then use this dot as a reference to move our robot.

Wiring connections

For the Facetrackingrobot program, we will need a minimum of three LEDs: one for the left eye, one for the right eye, and one LED for smile recognition. The three LEDs are shown in the following diagram...