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

Using PID to follow a wall

Driving along a wall using the PID algorithm requires a little more coordination. Let’s visualize the problem with a diagram:

Figure 10.12 – The robot following a wall

Figure 10.12 shows how our robot will follow a wall. First, the robot drives forward in the direction shown by the solid line with an arrow. We have turned the sensor out so that it can detect the wall in its cone (these distance sensors cover around 20 degrees). Based on the return of a close object (shown as a dashed line), the robot will adjust its heading to try and keep a constant distance. When the robot faces the wall, it will curve outward, and it may overshoot, but also, there is a step change in the wall, so the robot will adjust its path and straighten up.

We have a few issues. First, we have put the motors a little forward, and turning the sensor with the current placement would have the wheel in the path of the sensor, so we’ll need...