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)

OpenCV versions

Closely related to using Python 3 is using a more recent version of OpenCV. This may perform better but, at the time of writing, it is quite long-winded to install for Python 2.7. It installs easily in Python 3 by using a PiWheel (prebuilt packages for Python on the Raspberry Pi).

I'll assume that pip3 is the Python 3 pip installer:

$ sudo pip3 install picamera[array] numpy opencv-python

Following this, only one OpenCV function appears to have changed enough to require our code to change.

Find contours

In OpenCV 2.4.9 this function has the signature (arrangement of parameters and return values) of:

contours, hierarchy = cv.findContours(image, mode, method[, contours[, hierarchy[, offset]]] ).

We copy the...