Book Image

Robotics at Home with Raspberry Pi Pico

By : Danny Staple
Book Image

Robotics at Home with Raspberry Pi Pico

By: Danny Staple

Overview of this book

The field of robotics is expanding, and this is the perfect time to learn how to create robots at home for different purposes. This book will help you take your first steps in planning, building, and programming a robot with Raspberry Pi Pico, an impressive controller bursting with I/O capabilities. After a quick tour of Pico, you’ll begin designing a robot chassis in 3D CAD. With easy-to-follow instructions, shopping lists, and plans, you’ll start building the robot. Further, you’ll add simple sensors and outputs to extend the robot, reinforce your design skills, and build your knowledge in programming with CircuitPython. You’ll also learn about interactions with electronics, standard robotics algorithms, and the discipline and process for building robots. Moving forward, you’ll learn how to add more complicated sensors and robotic behaviors, with increasing complexity levels, giving you hands-on experience. You’ll learn about Raspberry Pi Pico’s excellent features, such as PIO, adding capabilities such as avoiding walls, detecting movement, and compass headings. You’ll combine these with Bluetooth BLE for seeing sensor data and remotely controlling your robot with a smartphone. Finally, you’ll program the robot to find its location in an arena. By the end of this book, you’ll have built a robot at home, and be well equipped to build more with different levels of complexity.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Basics – Preparing for Robotics with Raspberry Pi Pico
7
Part 2: Interfacing Raspberry Pi Pico with Simple Sensors and Outputs
12
Part 3: Adding More Robotic Behaviors to Raspberry Pi Pico

Introducing the PID algorithm

In this section, we will introduce the different parts of the PID algorithm while building on what you have already seen.

Control and feedback

Controlling robot systems generally depends on feedback loops like the following one:

Figure 10.1 – Control and feedback loop

The preceding figure shows data from the sensors going into a control algorithm. The algorithm controls the motor as its output. The motor will cause the robot to move. This movement leads to a feedback loop as the sensor reading changes and goes through the cycle again. This concept is known as closed-loop control.

This closed-loop lets the robot interact with the real world, adjusting its behavior to produce the desired result.

We built a simple system like this for our distance sensors. We’ll look more closely at that system next.

Bang-bang control

In the examples provided in Chapter 8, Sensing Distances to Detect Objects with Pico...