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

Always face North behavior

We’ll build a behavior with a heading as a set point for a PID and the IMU Euler heading as feedback. The error value between these will be how far, in degrees, the robot is facing away from the North heading. For example, a heading of 0 should be North – note that you could pick another heading as needed. We will use the PID output to control the motor movements, with the output adding to the speed of one motor and subtracting from the other, producing a turn.

Let’s see how this looks as a block diagram:

Figure 12.10 – Face North behavior block diagram

The preceding diagram shows the flow of data. The expected heading (or target) with the actual heading from the IMU are used to calculate the error. This error and dt (delta time) are the inputs to the PID. The output from the PID, the control signal, is added for one motor and subtracted for the other. The motors then result in robot movement, which...